Akademik

n.

2 to the power of 80 (approximately 10 to the power of 24) bytes, or a million trillion megabytes.

"In ten years, the volume of online data accessible either on the Internet or on corporate networks is expected to approach a yottabyte, or 1 trillion terabytes."

— "IBM Unveils Storage Capacity on Demand for Growing e-businesses," Business Wire, October 27, 2000

With multi-gigabyte hard drives now commonplace, the bar for what is considered "large" is getting raised all the time. To help you prepare for the coming age of truly massive storage, here's a review of the prefixes used at various levels of "bigness":

PREFIX POWER UNITS NUMBER

OF 10

kilo- 3 thousands 1,000

mega- 6 millions 1,000,000

giga- 9 billions 1,000,000,000

tera- 12 trillions 1,000,000,000,000

peta- 15 quadrillions 1,000,000,000,000,000

exa- 18 quintillions 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

zetta- 21 sextillions 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

yotta- 24 septillions 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

All the numerical prefixes are defined by the International Standards

Organization: http://www.iso.ch in a document called ISO 1000, "SI units and recommendations for the use of their multiples and of certain other units." (How's that for a mouthful of a title?) These prefixes

are agreed upon by various committees, but there is some logic to their etymology. For example, tera- comes from tetra-, "four," because tera- represents 1,000 to the 4th power. Similarly, peta- is derived from penta-, "five," exa- comes from hexa-, "six", zetta- is a variation of the Latin septum, "seven," and yotta- is a variation of octo-, "eight."

Since a kilobyte is actually 1,024 bytes, a megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes, and so on, the above numbers don't accurately reflect the exact byte values represented by each unit. Here are the exact values:

UNIT POWER ACTUAL BYTES

OF 2

kilobyte 10 1,024

megabyte 20 1,048,576

gigabyte 30 1,073,741,824

terabyte 40 1,099,511,627,776

petabyte 50 1,125,899,906,842,624

exabyte 60 1,152,921,504,606,846,976

zettabyte 70 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424

yottabyte 80 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176

To put this in some perspective (or not), it would take approximately 86 trillion years to download a 1-yottabyte file, and the entire contents of the Library of Congress would consume a mere 10 terabytes.

Still, takes less time than uploading a video on to YouTube.Wows, I hope I get to see Yottabytes in my lifetime