Do you know what comes next after Gigabyte (GB) and Terabyte (TB)?
Well, we are currently prevailing at GBs and TBs as our storage units, this is because these are the largest units that we normally use with our electronic gadgets. We commonly ask for an 8GB pen drive (Flash Disks), 1TB hard drives/SSD, 512GBs of phone storage and so on…
There is more than that, the currently largest acceptable unit is a Yottabyte, should we label it YB? 1 YB is equivalent to 1 septillion bytes. I know I am confusing you now. I also do not know what that is. So, let us get this straight.
The storage units start with bits, followed by bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes and then, we reach yottabytes. Each scale is at the rate of 1000 (except for bit-to-byte conversion which scales by 8). One yottabyte can hold more than 45 trillion 25-gigabyte Blu-ray discs (Are we still following?).
Because of the growing storage demands, and amounts of data generated, Yottabyte will soon not be enough, because the data generation is growing exponentially. Now the new recommendations include hellabyte or brontobyte which will be equivalent to 1000 Yottabytes.
The recommendation of the names is not scientific. They are coming from a “wow” reaction (I am avoiding harsh language here😂). Hellabyte comes from having “a hell of a lot of bytes” and the brontobyte is named after Brontosaurus, the largest dinosaur. To date, there is nothing measurable on the hella/brontobyte scale. But Cisco estimates that brontobytes could be used as soon as we do not expect — so we’re still not there yet.
Quick facts
1. Yottabyte storage is not yet in use, and there is nothing yet big enough to measure in Yottabytes.
2. In 2020, the amount of estimated data in the world was 44 Zettabytes.
3. Approximately 328.77 million terabytes of data are created each day.
4. Around 120 zettabytes of data will be generated this year (2023).
5. By 2025, the projected amount of data generated each day globally will reach 463 Exabytes.