Life Beyond Tera (or a Yottabyte is a Lotta Bytes)
December 1st, 2007
Thanks to computers, most people are now familiar with the mega- and giga- prefixes, as in megabyte and gigabyte. Many know that terabyte comes next, and the chosen few are familiar with petabyte (1015) and exabyte (1018). There are hard drive farms in the low petabyte range, and it’s estimated that the total amount of yearly data creation on the internet is about 161 exabytes. So these prefixes have a practical use. But what comes next? The official SI counting system defines two more powers of 103: zetta- (1021) and yotta- (1024). I’m not making these up. To get an idea of the scale involved here, the distance of the farthest visible star (13.7 light years) is approximately 130 yottameters.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
[link]josh Says:
December 2nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
I would have titled this “Yotta is a lotta”
[link]Chad Cloman Says:
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:18 pm
That’s a good idea. I’ll make the change.