| Yottaoctets (Yo) | Exbibits (Eibit) |
|---|---|
| 1 Yottaoctet | 6938893.90391 Eibit |
| 2 Yottaoctets | 13877787.8078 Eibit |
| 3 Yottaoctets | 20816681.7117 Eibit |
| 4 Yottaoctets | 27755575.6156 Eibit |
| 5 Yottaoctets | 34694469.5195 Eibit |
| 10 Yottaoctets | 69388939.0391 Eibit |
| 20 Yottaoctets | 138777878.078 Eibit |
| 25 Yottaoctets | 173472347.598 Eibit |
| 50 Yottaoctets | 346944695.195 Eibit |
| 100 Yottaoctets | 693889390.391 Eibit |
| Reference | Yottaoctets (Yo) | Exbibits (Eibit) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.6 × 10-22 Yo | 1.11022 × 10-15 Eibit |
| A three-minute MP3 | 3 × 10-18 Yo | 2.08167 × 10-11 Eibit |
| A smartphone photo | 4 × 10-18 Yo | 2.77556 × 10-11 Eibit |
| A high-definition film | 4 × 10-15 Yo | 0.0000000277556 Eibit |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 5 × 10-14 Yo | 0.000000346945 Eibit |
The yottaoctet is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand zettaoctets, or a septillion octets — a one followed by twenty-four zeros. Its symbol is Yo. Nothing that exists is measured in yottaoctets; the unit describes a quantity of data the world has not yet produced.
The total data held by humanity is currently estimated in the low hundreds of zettaoctets, so the world is a small fraction of the way to its first yottaoctet. On the growth rates of the last two decades, that threshold would be crossed sometime in the 2040s, though every long-range forecast in this field has been wrong in both directions.
The physical obstacles are severe. At the storage densities of current hard drives, a yottaoctet would need something like a hundred billion units. Manufacturing them at present rates would take centuries, powering them would need the electrical output of many countries, and housing them would require a building programme without precedent. The number is not absurd, but it is far beyond the current industrial base.
Research into higher-density storage exists partly because of this ceiling. DNA data storage, which encodes information in synthetic genetic sequences, offers densities millions of times higher than magnetic media, and a yottaoctet of DNA would fit in a room rather than a continent. Reading and writing it remain slow and costly, but the density argument is what keeps the field funded.
The yottaoctet also appears in claims that turn out to be exaggerated. Reports that intelligence agencies were building yottaoctet-scale facilities circulated widely in the 2010s and were not supported by the construction, the power supply or the storage market. Any claim about a yottaoctet of anything can be checked against total world manufacturing, which is a useful discipline.
Between 1991 and 2022 the yotta prefix was the top of the metric ladder, which is why it was the natural unit for speculative claims. The addition of ronna and quetta in 2022 gave the system three more decimal orders above it, and it is telling that this was done partly because data quantities were approaching the old ceiling.
One yottaoctet equals 1,000 zettaoctets, 1,000,000,000,000,000 gigaoctets, 8 yottabits, or about 0.8272 yobioctets.
The exbibit is a unit of digital information equal to two to the sixtieth power bits, which is 1,024 pebibits. Its symbol is Eibit. It is the binary counterpart of the exabit, and the two now differ by 15.3 per cent.
Two to the sixtieth is a number with a particular importance in computing, because sixty is close to the sixty-four bits of a modern processor address. A 64-bit machine can address sixteen exbioctets of memory, and that figure — 16 EiB — is the theoretical ceiling of the entire architecture. It appears in processor manuals, in operating system documentation and in the specification of every 64-bit filesystem.
No machine comes close to using that range. Current processors implement only forty-eight or fifty-seven of those sixty-four address bits, because wiring the full width would cost silicon for an address space nobody can fill. The unused bits are reserved, and widening the implementation is a straightforward matter whenever memory sizes make it worthwhile, which is the point of having chosen sixty-four in the first place.
An exbibit is 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets, or 128 pebioctets. That is more storage than any single organisation holds, and comparable to the combined annual output of a large part of the storage industry. As with all the larger binary units, it describes limits and capacities in specifications rather than anything that has been built.
The unit is also where filesystem designers set their maximum sizes. Filesystems built around 64-bit block pointers naturally have limits at exact powers of two, and several widely deployed ones specify maximum volume sizes in exbioctets. Those numbers are not aspirations; they are the arithmetic consequence of the pointer width, and they will hold until the architecture changes.
Reading the symbol correctly matters here. Eibit is the exbibit; Ebit is the exabit; EB and EiB are the octet forms of each. In a document where a fifteen per cent difference is significant — and at this scale it always is — the presence or absence of the lowercase i carries the entire meaning.
One exbibit equals 1,024 pebibits, 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets, or about 1.153 exabits.