Yottabyte


The yottabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix yotta indicates multiplication by the eighth power of 1000 or 1024 in the International System of Units, and therefore one yottabyte is one septillion bytes. The unit symbol for the yottabyte is YB. The yottabyte, adopted in 1991, is the largest of the formally defined multiples of the byte.
A related unit, the yobibyte, using a binary prefix, is equal to .

Examples

In 2010, it was estimated that storing a yottabyte on terabyte-size disk drives would require one million city block-size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. By late 2016, memory density had increased to the point where a yottabyte could be stored on SD cards occupying roughly twice the size of the Hindenburg.
The total amount of data that could be stored in the observable universe using each of the 1078 to 1082 atoms as single bits of information is between 1.25×1053 and 1.25×1057 yottabytes.
Since the radius of Holmium is 233 pm, an atomic memory device could store one yottabyte in an area roughly the size of a nickel.