| Zettaoctets (Zo) | Tebibits (Tibit) |
|---|---|
| 1 Zettaoctet | 7275957614.18 Tibit |
| 2 Zettaoctets | 14551915228.4 Tibit |
| 3 Zettaoctets | 21827872842.6 Tibit |
| 4 Zettaoctets | 29103830456.7 Tibit |
| 5 Zettaoctets | 36379788070.9 Tibit |
| 10 Zettaoctets | 72759576141.8 Tibit |
| 20 Zettaoctets | 145519152284 Tibit |
| 25 Zettaoctets | 181898940355 Tibit |
| 50 Zettaoctets | 363797880709 Tibit |
| 100 Zettaoctets | 727595761418 Tibit |
| Reference | Zettaoctets (Zo) | Tebibits (Tibit) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.6 × 10-19 Zo | 0.00000000116415 Tibit |
| A three-minute MP3 | 3 × 10-15 Zo | 0.0000218279 Tibit |
| A smartphone photo | 4 × 10-15 Zo | 0.0000291038 Tibit |
| A high-definition film | 4 × 10-12 Zo | 0.0291038 Tibit |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 5 × 10-11 Zo | 0.363798 Tibit |
The zettaoctet is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand exaoctets, or a sextillion octets. Its symbol is Zo. It is the unit in which the total quantity of data in the world is now described, and the only data unit that has given its name to an era.
That name came from the phrase the zettabyte era, used from around 2016, when annual global internet traffic first exceeded one zettaoctet. Estimates of the global datasphere — every file stored anywhere, plus everything created and immediately discarded — passed a hundred zettaoctets a few years later and continue to rise by tens of zettaoctets a year.
Understanding what these figures include matters more than the numbers themselves. They count copies. A single photograph on a phone is also on the phone's backup, on two servers in a cloud provider's data centre, in a caching layer, and possibly in a machine learning training set. Counting stored octets rather than distinct works inflates the total by a large factor that nobody has ever measured precisely.
The composition of the total is dominated by things nobody looks at. Surveillance and security video, most of it overwritten within weeks, is the single largest category. Sensor and telemetry data from industrial equipment, vehicles and buildings is second. Human-authored material of any kind is a minority, and text is a rounding error within that minority.
Manufacturing sets a hard limit on the total. All the world's storage factories together produce a few hundred exaoctets of new capacity per year, which is a fraction of a zettaoctet, so most data created is never stored at all. It is processed as it arrives and thrown away, and this is a deliberate design choice rather than a failure.
For a sense of the scale, a zettaoctet would be about eight thousand million large consumer hard drives, or roughly one for every person on Earth. Stacked flat, that many drives would form a column reaching well beyond the Moon. The unit describes a quantity that only exists as a sum across a whole planet's industry.
One zettaoctet equals 1,000 exaoctets, 1,000,000,000,000 gigaoctets, 8 zettabits, or about 0.8470 zebioctets.
The tebibit is a unit of digital information equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bits, which is 1,024 gibibits or two to the fortieth power. Its symbol is Tibit. It is the binary counterpart of the terabit, and the two now differ by 10 per cent, the point at which the distinction stops being pedantic and starts being financial.
That ten per cent is the reason the IEC prefixes exist. At the kibibit the discrepancy was 2.4 per cent and could be waved away; here it is a tenth of the quantity. In a contract for storage hardware, in a service agreement that guarantees capacity, or in a specification that a supplier must meet, a tenth is the difference between compliance and breach.
The unit's real home is flash memory, where dies are now made with capacities of one tebibit and above by stacking cell layers vertically. A modern flash die may hold a tebibit or two, and a package containing eight of them holds a teraoctet of raw capacity, from which spare blocks and management overhead are subtracted before anything reaches the user.
A tebibit is 137,438,953,472 octets, or 128 gibioctets. In practical terms it is the storage of a mid-range phone, or a couple of hours of uncompressed high-resolution video. The unit describes the raw material of storage devices rather than anything a person handles directly.
Filesystems also count in binary at this scale. A volume reported as 16 tebibytes by one tool and 17.6 terabytes by another is the same volume, and the difference is entirely in the base of the arithmetic. Anyone administering storage learns to check which convention a tool uses before comparing two numbers from different sources.
Correct notation is Tibit, with the capital T and lowercase i. It appears in flash memory datasheets, in filesystem documentation and in standards, and almost nowhere else. The presence of that lowercase i is the only reliable signal that a figure is binary, which is why careful technical writing uses it even when the difference seems small.
One tebibit equals 1,099,511,627,776 bits, 1,024 gibibits, 137,438,953,472 octets, or about 1.100 terabits.