What is an exabyte?

While computer users measure storage ca­pac­i­ties for photos, texts, and videos in gigabytes and terabytes, tech­nol­o­gy giants like Google and Tesla are already dealing in units of exabyte. When you’re scrolling through social networks, you may be able to imagine the huge number of terabytes of images and videos that ac­cu­mu­late on the servers of social media giants. And that’s only a fraction of the global data quan­ti­ties measured in exabytes on a monthly basis.

What is an exabyte?

Unlike clothing sizes, which even­tu­al­ly plateau at M, L, or XL, data volumes show no intention of stopping their growth. Quite the opposite: when IBM in­tro­duced the first hard drive with the IBM 305 RAMAC in 1956, it offered a storage capacity of just 3.75 megabytes. To put that into per­spec­tive, a single photo with a 12-megapixel res­o­lu­tion today requires roughly the same amount of storage space.

Globally, we now generate multiple exabytes of data monthly. Google alone claims to store several exabytes worth of data. The exabyte is a unit of in­for­ma­tion that’s still re­strict­ed to global data volumes and storage quan­ti­ties in data centers; it’s not a measure of our com­mer­cial­ly available hardware like the external storage hard drives we may use daily. In other words, it’s a measure of big data.

How many bytes are in an exabyte?

One byte is the smallest quantity of data and consists of 8 bits. This means that a bit is the smallest unit of in­for­ma­tion. So, every­thing is based on bits and bytes. One bit (binary in­for­ma­tion digit), can represent one of two states: 1 or 0. Since computers process in­for­ma­tion via the binary code, this is the smallest un­der­stand­able piece of in­for­ma­tion in the IT sector.

In in­for­ma­tion pro­cess­ing, one bit is too small to transmit or store complex in­for­ma­tion. One byte is therefore the smallest amount of data and serves as the basis for all storage ca­pac­i­ties. In contrast to the bit, one byte can assume 2⁸ (256 bits) different states. At least one byte is required to represent a letter or an alpha-numeric character.

According to the decimal system, an exabyte comprises 10¹⁸, i.e., one trillion bytes. A megabyte is made up of one million bytes. As a reminder: around 4 megabytes are required today to save a high-res­o­lu­tion photo. The current largest unit of in­for­ma­tion is the zettabyte, which, according to the binary system, cor­re­sponds to 1,024 exabytes. Anyone who owns an external hard drive in the terabyte range may be able to imagine what that means: 1,024 terabytes are 1 petabyte, 1,024 petabytes make 1 exabyte.

Exabyte compared to larger data sizes

Units to measure memory size typically come in two standards: binary and decimal. The binary standard is rec­om­mend­ed by the IEC (“In­ter­na­tion­al Elec­trotech­ni­cal Com­mis­sion”) because it maps storage ca­pac­i­ties more precisely and is better suited to data carriers. The decimal prefix is based on the SI (“In­ter­na­tion­al System of Units”) and is more common, but reflects rounded, less precise data quan­ti­ties. Where it gets confusing is that decimal prefixes are also being used for binary quan­ti­ties. So far, however, binary prefixes have failed to become more es­tab­lished.

Here are the eight official units of mea­sure­ment for byte powers:

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