Zettabyte: The New Digital Unit

By Suparna Chakaraborthy

Thursday, May 6, 2010, 15:33

As the size of the 'digital universe' swells up, the largest unit of measurement, Petabytes will soon be pushed to the second position with the introduction of a larger unit.

Zettabytes is now the largest unit of digital measurement.

One unit of zettabyte is equal to one million petabytes. To speak in a precise mathematical language, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes make up a zetabyte.

The total digital output till date, stands at 8,000,000 petabytes — which each represent a million gigabytes. But owing to explosion of social networking, online videos, digital photography and mobile phones, it is expected that the total measurement will exceed 1.2 zettabytes this year.

The current size of the world"s digital content is equivalent to all information that could be stored on 75 billion Apple iPads.

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