Have you ever wondered what those units like mega, giga, tera and even the exotic-sounding exabyte actually mean when describing computer data storage? As the world‘s digital footprint expands exponentially year after year, understanding these increments of scale has become essential knowledge.
In this article, we‘ll define gigabytes and exabytes, compare their real-world usage, and speculate on a future measured in yottabytes (!)
Let‘s start by visually seeing the immense difference:
| Unit | # of Bytes | Example Scale |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Gigabyte | 1,000,000,000 bytes | A few movies or a game install |
| 1 Exabyte | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes | Contents of 20 million Libraries of Congress |
From Megabytes to Yottabytes: The Evolution of Data Storage Scale
It wasn‘t that long ago that having a whole megabyte of space on your expensive new home computer felt nearly limitless. A megabyte (1 MB) is still the basic unit bytes are grouped in, equaling about 1 million bytes.
Hard drives eventually grew from megabytes into gigabytes (1 billion bytes) as photos, music, and then videos drove demand for more storage. Next, terabytes (1 trillion bytes, or 1000 GB) became commonplace for laptop storage as our digital lives expanded.
Now, in the age of 5G, 8K video, artificial intelligence computing, and cryptocurrencies, even terabytes look tiny. Companies like Google and Facebook now build data centers to reliably house exabytes worth of human data.
And they already have plans in place to reach zettabytes and even yottabytes in the future!
But before we imagine scales of bytes most people can‘t intuitively comprehend, let‘s level-set on the basics…
Back to Basics: Defining Gigabytes
Since 2005, most new personal computers have shipped with gigabytes worth of hard drive space. Nowadays laptops house 256 GB to 1+ terabytes (TB) internally. External USB drives also offer portable gigabyte-level storage to transport movies, back up photos, or expand your gaming library.
Specifically, one gigabyte (GB) equals one billion bytes. That‘s still an abstract number to most, so to make it tangible, one gigabyte can hold:
- 300-500 digital photos
- 6.5 minutes of HD 1080p video
- A two-hour audio movie in MP3 format
- A typical video game install around 35 GB
So in practice, modern HD video and gaming content keeps most non-power users comfortably in the realm of gigabytes daily. But what happens as 8K video goes mainstream alongside VR content and life-like video game graphics?
Well, companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook are already planning for consumers to adopt terabyte and even petabyte personal storage in the next 5 years.
But for now, gigabytes serve most laptops, desktops, gaming consoles and mobile devices perfectly fine…meanwhile, at hyperscale companies and research supercomputing centers, they‘ve already entered the era of exabyte data storage!
Welcome to the Exabyte Era
So what is an exabyte compared to a gigabyte?
Remember, one gigabyte equals one billion bytes. An exabyte is one BILLION gigabytes! That‘s over one quintillion bytes.
It‘s an amount of data nearly impossible for the human mind to intuitively comprehend or visualize effectively.
To understand exabyte scale, let‘s get creative…
- 5 exabytes could store every word uttered by every human being…ever
- 1 exabyte could hold over 50,000 years of HD 1080p video
- 500 exabytes has been estimated to store "all human knowledge"digitally
With comparisons like that, I think you get that an exabyte is an immense…almost scary scale of data!
So who on earth is actually using exabyte-level storage?
Exabyte Storage in the Real World
Given an exabyte‘s massive size, petabyte- and exabyte-scale data storage is currently only feasible for huge multinational corporations and research agencies.
For example…
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Google now stores an estimated 10-15 exabytes of data from all its products and services – Gmail, Drive files, Photos, YouTube videos, Maps data, Google Books scans, and much more.
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It‘s estimated Facebook‘s millions of daily uploads now totals 10-100+ petabytes. By 2025 industry experts forecast Facebook exceeding 1 exabyte of photos, videos and posts.
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The Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project is expected to generate over 1 exabyte PER DAY in image data, dwarfing even what tech giants store globally. New supercomputers capable of processing real-time exascale datasets had to be created!
As you can see from these examples, we‘ve clearly entered the era of "Big Data" requiring exabyte-class scale. But what comes next when even exabytes seem too small?
Welcome to the Yottabyte Era (Someday…)
Yes, there are already larger byte units envisioned beyond exabytes!
The biggest currently defined is the mind-boggling yottabyte – equal to 1 septillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).
That‘s 1 trillion terabytes! We can‘t fully comprehend that scale, but physics researchers say that storing even one yottabyte would require over 1 trillion 1TB hard drives. If you made a stack of those drives, it would reach over halfway to the Moon!
While one-yottabyte storage isn‘t quite feasible yet outside of theory, supercomputers used in climate modeling, nuclear fusion/fission simulations, and quantum physics can require petabytes and approach exabytes in size already.
For now, exabyte infrastructure seems vast enough to meet humanity‘s insatiable computing appetite. But with AI, VR, genome sequencing and computational cosmology all exponentially demanding more computing power, yottascale big data may arrive faster than we ever imagined!
From Your Gigs to the Cloud‘s Exabytes
I hope this article helped compare the immense scale differences between the gigabytes that power your smartphones and laptops versus the exotic exabyte-era computing big companies now invest billions in.
And next time your friend mentions the "256 gigs" of storage in their new phone, you can casually remark on "this one company I read about storing 10 billion times that much data across 14 exabyte data centers!"
