From Kilobytes to Yottabytes: Navigating the World of Data Volumes

Megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes. We’ve all heard these words, seen them in file sizes on our computers, or storage remaining on our phones when we need to get rid of some of our pictures. But exactly how much is a gigabyte? What does it mean? Let’s get into it.

The smallest piece of data in a computer is a bit. It’s what’s known as a Binary Digit (a 1 or a 0), and it translates to the computer like a light switch – on or off. Some of you may remember back when programming was done on punch cards. That was the same idea, punched or unpunched representing on and off.

Something so small is hard to do much with, though, so we grouped them together in sets of 8 to make a byte. Why 8? That’s a whole other topic, but it boils down to IBM deciding in the 1950s that that was what they were going with, and the world following their lead.

We use bytes for Hexadecimal numbers in things like color codes – Simplex Red is #ED1C24 – which is 2 bytes per character, but for most other purposes they’re just too small.

The next size up is a Kilobyte (KB), which is seen most often as a file size. It’s 1024 Bytes, so 8192 Bits. That sure seems like a lot of space! But we don’t see a lot of applications at this size, because it’s still just too small. It can hold data that other applications can read, but it can’t hold many instructions.

So, we step up to a Megabyte (MB), equal to 1024 KB, or 8.3 million Bits. The video game Quake, released in 1996, is about 50 MB, and many games from the same era count their size in megabytes. A lot of email providers limit uploads to a few megabytes at most – a security feature, we assure you – and many file types round out to a few MB. Sometimes, they’re so close to 1 MB that they still count in KB!

Modern games need more information to display those amazing graphics, so we need to go deeper. Gigabytes (GB) are up next, and you’ll never guess this, but they’re equivalent to 1024 MB (8.5 billion bits). Most things now use GB as the default size. Phones and tablets have GB sizes for their default memory, most USB flash drives and SD cards are in GB, and a lot of heavier applications require GB of space on your hard drive. Minecraft is less than 1, but its world files are about 1 GB. Any video game with modern realistic graphics is at least 5. Gigabytes get things done. And yet, that’s not where they stop.

Some of you may have servers, and those servers hold a lot of data. We needed something even bigger than a gigabyte, so the next step is Terabyte (TB). If you can believe it, one TB is 1024 GB, which is about 8.7 trillion bytes. This baby can fit so much data in it! Most of your servers are operating with terabyte drives, and it’s not uncommon to see TB options when you’re shopping for computers. We see these used mostly for larger storage solutions. We aren’t creating applications or files that are TB size, it’s more like a lot of little things adding up to that.

We are in an era where we’re making a lot of data, and that must go somewhere. Sure, a terabyte is fine for some uses, but that’s not where the storage sizes end. For companies storing even more data, they needed even bigger file sizes, so it keeps going up! 1024 TB is a Petabyte (PB), which you can’t even get on a single drive, at least not at our current level of technology. And at that size of data, we start needing extra storage just to manage our storage!

But even that isn’t big enough for everyone! Next size up is Exabyte (EB), which is – of course – 1024 PB. What kind of data needs that much space? Google, Amazon, the big guys who hold on to a lot of information, they need that much space. I found one source that said Google stores about 10-15 EB of data. Now that’s a lot of information!

There is one more size that we use, but it’s much rarer, and that’s the Zettabyte (ZB). We use this to talk about the amount of information that’s on the whole internet. It’s a lot of data, more than any one person can produce or consume.

Up above ZB is the Yottabyte, which is used in much the same way as a Zettabyte - that is to say mostly theoretical. It’s Big Data, and not easy to store or handle. If we gathered enough 1 TB hard drives to equal a zettabyte, it would cover Antarctica. A Yottabyte, on the other hand, would not only cover the earth, it would cover it more than twenty times.

And we have words for sizes even larger than those. We don’t need them (yet), but the names are mostly settled on. 1024 YB is a Brontobyte, and 1024 Brontobytes is a Geobyte (although the name for the last one changes). At that size, it’s almost impossible to imagine!

For the most part, we don’t have to worry about sizes above a Terabyte, but hopefully you found this information helpful! Don’t forget to back up your data, no matter what size it is. And if you need help backing up your data, contact Simplex-IT!