Yottabyte

You may not be too familiar with this term, but you will be within the next year or so I think.

Disk space is measured in bytes, and each term used is a multiple of 1000 of the previous one. So we have:

  • Bytes
  • Kilobytes (1000 bytes)
  • Megabytes (1000 kB)
  • Gigabytes (1000 Mb)
  • Terabytes (1000 Gb)
  • Petabytes (1000 Tb)
  • Exabytes (1000 Pb)
  • Zettabytes (1000 Eb)
  • Yottabytes (1000 Zb)

This is a huge amount of storage. When I started in IT (in the late 80s) a 40 Mb hard drive was huge. Less than 30 years later and we’re talking about something 6 with 18 zeros (Ie 6 000 000 000 000 000 000) bigger!

Interestingly, the name comes from the Star Wars character, Yoda.