Exabyte

What Does Exabyte Mean?

An exabyte (EB) is a unit of digital information storage used to denote the size of data. It is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes (GB), 1,000 petabytes (PB) or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (B).

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Exabyte

The prefix "exa" is part of the International System of Units (SI), and means 1018 units. Hard disk manufacturers label their products in SI units, which may confuse some people in the IT field. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) all recommend using the exbibyte (EiB) unit, which signifies 260 bytes and is more accurate for the measure of bytes.

Two interpretations can be made using the two standards:

  • Using SI, one exabyte is equivalent to 1,000 petabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
  • Using traditional binary measurement, one exabyte is equivalent to 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, that’s 260 bytes, also equivalent to 1 exbibyte.
Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Buzzwords and Jargon Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…