Data & Analytics

What is Zettabyte?

Quick answer

A unit of digital information equal to one sextillion (10 to the power of 21) bytes, or one billion terabytes.

Zettabyte, explained

Units of data scale up by factors of 1,000 in the decimal system: kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, then zettabyte. One zettabyte equals a billion terabytes, more than any single organization stores, so the unit is mainly used to describe global totals, such as the amount of data created or transmitted worldwide each year.

The binary counterpart, the zebibyte, equals 2 to the power of 70 bytes, which is slightly larger. Beyond the zettabyte comes the yottabyte, and newer prefixes, ronna and quetta, were adopted in 2022. Talking in zettabytes highlights the scale of challenges facing data centers, networks, and storage technology, and why efficient data management and green computing are increasingly important.

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