What is Exabyte? (Explained)

What is Exabyte?

An exabyte, denoted as EB, refers to a large amount of data and a unit of data storage in the world of computers.

Technically, exabyte is an SI-created term to measure large amounts of data. If a single unit of data is one bit, and a byte consists of eight bits, an exabyte contains one quintillion bytes.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• An exabyte is a multiple of bytes and is used as a unit of data storage or file size in the computers.
• Here, the term ‘exa’ signifies that a byte is multiplied by the sixth power of 1,000, which is equal to one quintillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
• Usually, an exabyte is referred to as Ebyte in the short form, and EB is the symbol to indicate this unit.
• One exabyte is equal to 1000 petabytes, 1,000,000 terabytes, 1 million terabytes, or 1 billion gigabytes.
• An exabyte is slightly smaller than an exbibyte, where one exbibyte is in fact 15.2% bigger.

Understanding Exabyte

One exabyte consists of multiple power of bytes. Here the prefix ‘exa” denotes a billion of one billion or one quintillion. This is a decimal term.

Exabyte, typically, is not a measuring unit of the hardware items that are commercially available, such as the external storage hard drives used day-to-day by average users. Ideally, these devices do not contain huge amounts of data.

Typically, an exabyte is used as a measuring unit for exceptionally large amounts of data.

For example, according to some technologists, all the words that are ever spoken by mankind are estimated to be equal to only five exabytes. So, this gives an idea of its extent.

Ideally, one byte is equal to eight bits, which is considered to be the smallest unit of data in a computer.

A bit can be either 0 or 1. In other words, the term ‘exa’ is said to be the multiplication by the 6^th power of 1000, and is typically abbreviated as EB.

However, EB is the abbreviation of exabyte in both the metric system as well as in the binary system, but the value in each is slightly different.

In the metric system, it is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, and in the binary system, its value is equal to 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes.

Ideally, the multiple power of bytes is also in the case of 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal, which is a little bit more than one quintillion or 10 to the eighteenth power of byte.

However, for the sake of simplicity, it is commonly said that one exabyte of data is around one quintillion bytes.

However, exabyte (EB) is not the same as an exbibyte (EiB), which is also the name of measuring a unit for data capacity.

This specific unit of the binary system is used to measure the storage capacity, which is based on powers of two.

This means that one exbibyte is equal to 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, while on the other hand, one exabyte is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Therefore, you can say that one exbibyte is more than 15.2% bigger than one exabyte.

However, the unit exbibyte is not used very often these days as compared to exabyte.

Typically, an exabyte is in between a petabyte and a zettabyte, where the former comes before it and the latter comes after it.

Conversion

Here is a list of some of the values that you will get when you convert an exabyte into some of the most common units:

• If you express one exabyte in a bit (b), the value of it will be 0.000000000000000001.
• If you express one exabyte in a kilobyte (KB), the value of it will be 0.000000000000001.
• If you express one exabyte in a megabyte (MB), the value of it will be 0.000000000001.
• If you express one exabyte in a gigabyte (GB), the value of it will be 0.000000001.
• If you express one exabyte in a terabyte (TB), the value of it will be 0.000001.
• If you express one exabyte in a petabyte (PB), the value of it will be 0.001.
• If you express one exabyte in an exabit (Eb), the value of it will be 0.125.
• If you express one exabyte in a zettabyte (ZB), the value of it will be 1,000.
• If you express one exabyte in a yottabyte (YB), the value of it will be 1,000,000.

What is Exabyte Used for?

An exabyte is a unit used to measure large amounts of data or data storage capacity. In fact, the value of one exabyte is so large that it can be used to measure the total data storage of several storage networks.

It is also used to measure the amount of data transferred over the internet over a particular period of time, which is, needless to say, exceptionally large.

Exabyte is also used as one of the units to measure big data and store large amounts of data, especially across large organizations, such as data centers and major companies such as Microsoft, apart from petabytes.

Is an Exabyte Bigger than a Terabyte?

Yes, an exabyte is bigger than a terabyte. In fact, one exabyte is equal to approximately 1,000,000 terabytes.

Conclusion

An exabyte is an extremely large unit of digital data. It is equal to one quintillion bytes and is used in large data centers.

It is a much larger unit than a megabyte, a kilobyte and a gigabyte, the most commonly used units for data storage measurement in day-to-day computing by using commercially available hardware.