| Petaoctets (Po) | Zebioctets (Zio) |
|---|---|
| 1 Petaoctet | 0.000000847032947254 Zio |
| 2 Petaoctets | 0.00000169406589451 Zio |
| 3 Petaoctets | 0.00000254109884176 Zio |
| 4 Petaoctets | 0.00000338813178902 Zio |
| 5 Petaoctets | 0.00000423516473627 Zio |
| 10 Petaoctets | 0.00000847032947254 Zio |
| 20 Petaoctets | 0.0000169406589451 Zio |
| 25 Petaoctets | 0.0000211758236814 Zio |
| 50 Petaoctets | 0.0000423516473627 Zio |
| 100 Petaoctets | 0.0000847032947254 Zio |
| Reference | Petaoctets (Po) | Zebioctets (Zio) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.6 × 10-13 Po | 1.35525 × 10-19 Zio |
| A three-minute MP3 | 0.000000003 Po | 2.5411 × 10-15 Zio |
| A smartphone photo | 0.000000004 Po | 3.38813 × 10-15 Zio |
| A high-definition film | 0.000004 Po | 3.38813 × 10-12 Zio |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 0.00005 Po | 4.23516 × 10-11 Zio |
The petaoctet is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand teraoctets, or a million gigaoctets. Its symbol is Po. It is the unit of institutional storage: the scale at which data belongs to an organisation rather than to a person, and at which keeping it becomes a budget line rather than an afterthought.
A petaoctet is roughly the storage of a thousand large consumer hard drives, or the text of every book ever published several times over. In video terms it is about twenty thousand hours in ultra-high definition, or two and a half years of continuous viewing. The entire catalogue of a large streaming service, held once at each quality level, comes to a few petaoctets.
Science reached this scale first. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN records tens of petaoctets a year after its trigger systems have already discarded more than 99.99 per cent of what the detectors see, and the full archive runs to several hundred petaoctets. Astronomy, genomics and climate modelling all keep archives of comparable size, and the discipline of managing them became a research field of its own.
Commercially the petaoctet describes a single data centre's storage rather than a company's total. A large organisation holds tens or hundreds of petaoctets across many sites, and the largest cloud providers hold exaoctets. At this size the practical problems are not capacity but the electricity to keep the drives spinning, the cooling, and the certainty that a fraction of the hardware is failing at any moment.
That last point drives the design. In a petaoctet array, drive failures are not exceptional events but a continuous background rate, so the system is built to lose devices constantly and rebuild without interruption. Data is stored with erasure coding across many machines, and no single copy of anything is trusted.
Reading a petaoctet is itself a problem. Even at ten gigaoctets per second, a rate few systems sustain, a full pass takes more than a day. This is why analysis at this scale is designed to move the computation to the data rather than the data to the computation, an inversion that shaped the whole field of distributed processing.
One petaoctet equals 1,000 teraoctets, 1,000,000 gigaoctets, 8 petabits, or about 0.8882 pebioctets.
The zebioctet is a unit of digital information equal to two to the seventieth power octets, which is 1,024 exbioctets. Its symbol is Zio. It is the binary counterpart of the zettaoctet, and the two differ by 18.1 per cent.
Nothing of this size exists. The total quantity of data held by humanity, counting every copy and every backup, is estimated in the low hundreds of zettaoctets, and a zebioctet is 1.18 zettaoctets, so the world holds a few hundred of these units in total. It is the first binary unit for which the world's entire stock is a small multiple rather than a large one.
The unit is defined for completeness rather than for use, which is a deliberate feature of both the metric and the IEC systems. Every prefix applies to every unit without exception, so a reader who has never seen Zio can decode it from the prefix alone. A system that ran out of names at some arbitrary point would force each future user to invent an extension, and rival extensions are how ambiguity is born.
There is one place where the unit would arise naturally. Storage addressing beyond 64 bits has been designed but not needed: the ZFS filesystem uses 128-bit block pointers, giving it a theoretical capacity far beyond any binary prefix that has a name. Where such a scheme states intermediate limits, those limits fall in this range and are properly written in zebioctets.
The 18.1 per cent gap between zebioctet and zettaoctet is worth holding in mind when reading forecasts. Predictions of global data growth are published in zettaoctets, and any that were computed in binary and reported in decimal are nearly a fifth off. Given that such forecasts are already rough, that error is not the largest source of uncertainty, but it is an avoidable one.
The symbol Zio, like all the IEC symbols, is a capital letter followed by lowercase i and then the unit. It is the presence of that i, rather than any statement in the text, that tells a reader unambiguously which quantity is meant, and a document that omits it has not said what it appears to have said.
One zebioctet equals 1,024 exbioctets, 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 octets, 8 zebibits, or about 1.181 zettaoctets.