Yottabyte

What Does Yottabyte Mean?

A yottabyte (YB) is a unit of digital information storage used to denote the size of data. It is equivalent to a quadrillion gigabytes, 1,000 zettabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Techopedia Explains Yottabyte

The prefix "yotta" is part of the International System of Units (SI), and means 10²⁴. Hard disk manufacturers label their products in SI, which may confuse some people in the IT field. The ISO, IEEE and the IEC all recommend using the unit yobibyte, which signifies 2⁸⁰bytes.

Two interpretations can be made using the two standards:

Using SI, one yottabyte is equivalent to 1,000 zettabytes or 10²⁴ bytes.
Using traditional binary measurement, one yottabyte is equivalent to 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes, that’s 2⁸⁰ bytes, also equivalent to 1 yobibyte (YiB).

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Margaret Rouse

Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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