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Exabyte

Multiples of bytes
SI decimal prefixesBinary
usage		IEC binary prefixes
Name
(Symbol)		ValueName
(Symbol)		Value
kilobyte (kB)103210kibibyte (KiB)210
megabyte (MB)106220mebibyte (MiB)220
gigabyte (GB)109230gibibyte (GiB)230
terabyte (TB)1012240tebibyte (TiB)240
petabyte (PB)1015250pebibyte (PiB)250
exabyte (EB)1018260exbibyte (EiB)260
zettabyte (ZB)1021270zebibyte (ZiB)270
yottabyte (YB)1024280yobibyte (YiB)280
See also: Multiples of bits · Orders of magnitude of data

The exabyte (derived from the SI prefix exa-) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quintillion bytes (short scale). The unit symbol for the exabyte is EB. The unit prefix exa indicates the sixth power of 1000:

  • 1 EB = 1000000000000000000B = 1018 bytes = 1000000000gigabytes = 1000000terabytes = 1000petabytes

The exbibyte, using a binary prefix, is the analogous power of 1024 bytes.

In principle, the 64-bit microprocessors found in many computers can address 16 exabytes of memory.[1]

Contents

Usage examples

  • The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007. This is equivalent to less than one 730-MB CDs per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), roughly 4 CDs per person of 1993, 12 CDs per person in the year 2000, and almost 61 CDs per person in 2007. Piling up the imagined 404 billion CDs from 2007 would create a stack from the earth to the moon and a quarter of this distance beyond (with 1.2 mm thickness per CD).[2]
  • The world’s technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986, 715 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1993, 1,200 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000, and 1,900 in 2007.[2]
  • The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way telecommunication networks was 0.281 exabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986, 0.471 in 1993, 2.2 in 2000, and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007.[2]
  • In 2004, the global monthly Internet traffic passed 1 exabyte for the first time. In January 2007, Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute coined the term exaflood for a supposedly impending flood of exabytes that would cause the Internet's congestive collapse.[3][4] Nevertheless, the global Internet traffic has continued its exponential growth, undisturbed, and as of March 2010[update] it is estimated at 21 exabytes per month.[5]
  • According to the June 2009 Cisco Visual Networking Index IP traffic forecast, global mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 131 percent between 2008 and 2013, reaching over two exabytes per month by 2013.[6]
  • According to the 2011 update of Cisco's VNI IP traffic forecast, by 2015, annual global IP traffic will reach 966 exabytes or nearly one full zettabyte. Internet video will account for 61% of total Internet data.[7]
  • The global data volume at the end of 2009 has reached 800 exabytes.[8]
  • According to an IDC paper sponsored by EMC Corporation, 161 exabytes of data were created in 2006, "3 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written," with the number expected to hit 988 exabytes in 2010.[9][10][11]
  • According to the CSIRO, in the next decade, astronomers expect to be processing 10 petabytes of data every hour from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope.[12] The array is thus expected to generate approximately one exabyte every four days of operation. According to IBM, the new SKA telescope initiative will generate over an exabyte of data every day. IBM is designing hardware to process this information.[13]
  • According to the Digital Britain Report,[14] 494 exabytes of data was transferred across the globe on June 15, 2009.

Several filesystems use disk formats that support theoretical volume sizes of several exabytes, including Btrfs, XFS, ZFS, exFAT, NTFS, HFS Plus, and ReFS.

  • The ext4 file system format supports volumes up to 1 exabyte in size, although the userspace tools cannot yet administer such filesystems.
  • Oracle Corporation claimed[15] the first Exabyte tape library with the SL8500 and the T10000C tape drive in January 2011.

Practical comparisons

All words ever spoken

A popular expression claims that "all words ever spoken by human beings" could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data,[16][17][18] (although this project is now outdated and therefore not entirely accurate) often citing a project at the UC Berkeley School of Information in support.[19] The 2003 University of California Berkeley report credits the estimate to the website of Caltech researcher Roy Williams, where the statement can be found as early as May 1999.[20] This statement has been criticized.[21][22] Mark Liberman calculated the storage requirements for all human speech at 42 zettabytes (42,000 exabytes, and 8,400 times the original estimate), if digitized as 16 kHz 16-bit audio, although he did freely confess that "maybe the authors [of the exabyte estimate] were thinking about text."[23]

Earlier Berkeley studies estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human-produced information (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was about 12 exabytes of data.[24] The 2003 Berkeley report stated that in 2002 alone, "telephone calls worldwide on both landlines and mobile phones contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form" and that "it would take 9.25 exabytes of storage to hold all U.S. [telephone] calls each year."[19] International Data Corporation estimates that approximately 160 exabytes of digital information were created, captured, and replicated worldwide in 2006.[25] A research from University of Southern California estimates that the amount of data stored in the world by 2007 was 295 exabytes and the amount of information shared on two-way communications technology, such as cell phones in 2007 as 65 exabytes.[26][27]

See also

References

  1. ^ "A brief history of virtual storage and 64-bit addressability". http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocen ter/zos/basics/index.jsp?topic=/com.i bm.zos.zconcepts/zconcepts_102.htm. Retrieved 2007-02-17.
  2. ^ a b c "The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information", Martin Hilbert and Priscila López (2011), Science (journal), 332(6025), 60–65; see also "free access to the study" and "video animation".
  3. ^ Bret Swanson (January 20, 2007). "The Coming Exaflood". Wall Street Journal. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/view DB/index.php?command=view&id=3869. Retrieved 2007-02-17.
  4. ^ Grant Gross (November 24, 2007). "Internet Could Max Out in 2 Years, Study Says". PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139 885-pg,1/article.html. Retrieved 2007-11-28.
  5. ^ Cisco Systems
  6. ^ Cisco Visual Networking Index (Cisco VNI)
  7. ^ http://allthingsd.com/20110601/cisco- the-internet-is-like-really-big-and-g etting-bigger/
  8. ^ "Global data volume 2009 reached 800 exabyte", genevaassociation.org, May 2010. Retrieved 2012-02-16.
  9. ^ John Gantz (March, 2008). "An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011". IDC. http://www.emc.com/digital_universe/. Retrieved 2009-04-20.
  10. ^ Bree Nordenson (April 1, 2009). "Overload! Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information". Columbia Journalism Review. http://www.cjr.org/feature/overload_1 .php. Retrieved 2009-04-20.
  11. ^ Kathleen Parker (December, 2008). "Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2009/03/31/AR20090331 03318.html. Retrieved 2009-04-11.
  12. ^ "From molecules to the Milky Way: dealing with the data deluge". http://www.csiro.au/news/ps3ng.html. Retrieved 2007-11-10.
  13. ^ http://www.computerworld.com.au/artic le/319128/ska_telescope_provide_billi on_pcs_worth_processing_updated_/
  14. ^ [1]
  15. ^ [2]
  16. ^ Verlyn Klinkenborg (November 12, 2003). "Trying to Measure the Amount of Information That Humans Create". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/opi nion/12WED4.html. Retrieved 2006-07-19. (login)
  17. ^ "How many bytes for...". techtarget.com. http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/s Definition/0,,sid5_gci944596,00.html. Retrieved 2006-07-19.
  18. ^ "'Robbie the Robot' making data easier to mine". purdue.edu. December 6, 2005. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html3month /2005/051206.McKay.petabyte.html. Retrieved 2007-02-17.
  19. ^ a b "How Much Information? 2003". berkeley.edu. http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/researc h/projects/how-much-info-2003/. Retrieved 2006-07-19.
  20. ^ Roy Williams. "Data Powers of Ten". Archived from the original on 1999-05-08. http://web.archive.org/web/1999050806 2723/http://www.ccsf.caltech.edu/~roy /dataquan/. Retrieved 2006-07-19.
  21. ^ Mark Liberman (November 12, 2003). "More on the 5 exabyte mistake". upenn.edu. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langua gelog/archives/000110.html. Retrieved 2006-07-19.
  22. ^ Brian Carnell (December 31, 2003). "How Much Storage Is Required to Store Every Word Ever Spoken by Human Beings?". brian.carnell.com. Archived from the original on 2006-02-06. http://web.archive.org/web/2006020608 1135/http://brian.carnell.com/archive s/years/2003/12/000022.html. Retrieved 2006-07-19.
  23. ^ Mark Liberman (November 3, 2003). "Zettascale Linguistics". upenn.edu. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langua gelog/archives/000087.html. Retrieved 2007-02-17.
  24. ^ Juan Enriquez (Fall/Winter 2003). "The Data That Defines Us". CIO Magazine. http://www.cio.com/archive/092203/enr iquez.html. Retrieved 2006-07-19.
  25. ^ Brian Bergstein (March 5, 2007). "So much data, relatively little space". BusinessWeek. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financ ialnews/D8NMAG802.htm. Retrieved 2007-03-05.
  26. ^ Jon Stewart (February 11, 2011). "Global data storage calculated at 295 exabytes". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology- 12419672.
  27. ^ Suzanne Wu (February 10, 2011). "How Much Information Is There in the World?". USC. http://uscnews.usc.edu/science_techno logy/how_much_information_is_there_in _the_world.html.

External links

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