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Glite Dictionary
yottabyte

yottabyte

1 9.9
A very large unit of computer data equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
  • noun
  • /ˈjɒtəˌbaɪt/
  • Specialized
translation icon : yottabyte
  • The other day, my uncle asked me if my other uncle was "inventing yottabytes."

Examples

  • The fact is, no one has yet coined a term for any amount of data larger than a yottabyte because there's nowhere close to that much information waiting to be stored, and we certainly don't have the means to store it all even if there was.

    Blog text (18)

  • The name of my uncle's company is, in fact, Yottabyte, and in terms of far-reaching goals, sure, he'd love to be the one to harness (or just store) that amount of data, but so far it's just a name.

    Blog text (18)

  • A yottabyte is 1 septillion bytes.

    Blog text (18)

  • I took the question more literally than I should have and replied with some snide remark about it making no sense to say that anyone is "inventing yottabytes."

    Blog text (18)

  • It's from a few months ago, and I'm shocked that I haven't heard more about it. In between an exabyte and a yottabyte, there is a zettabyte, which is equal to 1 billion terabytes, or 10^21 bytes.

    Blog text (18)

  • A yottabyte is a unit of digital information equal to one septillion bytes.

  • As data storage technology advances, we may soon need yottabytes to store all the information online.

  • The amount of data generated globally every day is already nearing the yottabyte threshold.

Synonyms

YB
vsyottabyte
  • Specialized
9.4

A very large unit for measuring digital information equal to one thousand zettabytes

is the full written term rather than its shortened written form

How Much Data

yottabyte
  • Specialized
1 9.9
petabyte
  • Specialized
2 7.2
terabyte
  • Specialized
8 4.1
gigabyte
  • Specialized
13 2.7
megabyte
  • Specialized
10 3.0
kilobyte
  • Specialized
4 3.6
byte
  • Specialized
23 3.6

Surface Forms

yottabyte singular
yottabytes plural

Morphology

yottabyte = byte (semi-transparent) = yotta + byte

Formed by the SI prefix 'yotta-' + 'byte'; the structure is regular but the specific magnitude denoted by 'yotta' is specialized and unknown to many learners.

Etymology

Yottabyte combines the prefix yotta, which means '1 followed by 24 zeros', and byte, which means 'a unit of digital information'. So a yottabyte is a 'very, very large number of bytes', just like the smaller amounts you know in megabyte and gigabyte.