| Zebioctets (Zio) | Exabits (Ebit) |
|---|---|
| 1 Zebioctet | 9444.73296574 Ebit |
| 2 Zebioctets | 18889.4659315 Ebit |
| 3 Zebioctets | 28334.1988972 Ebit |
| 4 Zebioctets | 37778.931863 Ebit |
| 5 Zebioctets | 47223.6648287 Ebit |
| 10 Zebioctets | 94447.3296574 Ebit |
| 20 Zebioctets | 188894.659315 Ebit |
| 25 Zebioctets | 236118.324143 Ebit |
| 50 Zebioctets | 472236.648287 Ebit |
| 100 Zebioctets | 944473.296574 Ebit |
| Reference | Zebioctets (Zio) | Exabits (Ebit) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.35525 × 10-19 Zio | 1.28 × 10-15 Ebit |
| A three-minute MP3 | 2.5411 × 10-15 Zio | 2.4 × 10-11 Ebit |
| A smartphone photo | 3.38813 × 10-15 Zio | 3.2 × 10-11 Ebit |
| A high-definition film | 3.38813 × 10-12 Zio | 0.000000032 Ebit |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 4.23516 × 10-11 Zio | 0.0000004 Ebit |
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.
The exabit is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand petabits, or a billion billion bits. Its symbol is Ebit. At this scale no device, no cable and no building is being described. The exabit measures the traffic of whole regions and the output of entire industries over stretches of time.
An exabit is 125 petaoctets. The most common place to meet the unit is in figures for global internet traffic, which are usually given in exaoctets per month. Worldwide traffic passed one exaoctet per month around 2004, reached about a hundred by 2017 and is now several hundred, which in bits is several thousand exabits every month.
Those totals divide in revealing ways. The overwhelming majority is video, and the rest is dominated by software updates, cloud synchronisation and machine-to-machine traffic rather than by anything a person is actively reading. A single popular film released simultaneously worldwide can move a measurable fraction of an exabit in a day.
Storage at this scale exists only as aggregates. The combined capacity of all the hard drives and flash memory manufactured in a year is measured in hundreds of exaoctets, which is thousands of exabits. Estimates of all the data held by humanity at any moment run into the tens of zettaoctets, and the exabit is the unit one step below that in which the components of such estimates are counted.
Scientific instruments produce exabit quantities before any of it is stored. The Square Kilometre Array radio telescope generates raw data at a rate that would fill exaoctets within days, and its design is built around discarding and summarising in real time rather than recording. The same is true of the large particle detectors and of high-resolution climate simulations.
The prefix exa comes from the Greek for six, the exabit being a thousand to the sixth power in bits. It was adopted in 1975 along with peta, at a time when no one expected either to describe anything but astronomical or theoretical quantities. Both are now ordinary units in the technology industry, which says something about how fast the numbers grew.
One exabit equals 1,000 petabits, 125 petaoctets, or about 0.8674 exbibits.