Talk:Yottabyte

Discussion about centralization took place at Talk:Binary prefix.

Binary vs Decimal

Why does the binary approximation need citation? The suffix may not be in common usage at this point, but it doesn't seem hard to imagine that future computers manufactured and described will have exactly that amount (1024^8) of addressable memory. Once we have that amount, considering precedent, common terminology will unlikely match the unambiguous SI term. This may be a bit crystal ball, but I don't think the world is likely to change that much between now, and when a yottabyte is feasibly and usefully attainable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.231.183.2 (talk) 01:18, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

You said it yourself. The article is not about how the term might be used in the future, but about how the term is used now, in July 2008. Can you cite any uses in the binary sense? Thunderbird2 (talk) 08:52, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. I now understand a bit more about the wiki project (and I like that they used the term "crystal ball" :) The 2nd sub-paragraph shows exactly why my reasoning was incorrect. So, yes, this needs to have a citation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.231.183.2 (talk) 04:02, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Comments below (in a different section) show that IEC 60027 has something to say about this. I don't know enough about that standard to comment, but could someone who does know comment on a) whether that standard suggests that it is acceptable to use yottabyte to refer to 1024^8 and b) whether this counts as a significant citation. Maybe the article should be changed to refer to yobibyte, and simply state that there isn't precedent to say that yottabyte and yobibyte can be synonyms in common usage. The yobibyte article seems also to make the assertion that they are synonyms, so it should also have a needs-citation flag. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.231.183.2 (talk) 04:13, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

IEC makes it clear that (according to their definitions) a yottabyte is exactly 1000^8 bytes, whereas a yobibyte is exactly 1024^8 bytes. The yobibyte article cites the IEC standard and therefore doesn't need the flag. To my knowledge there is no standards body that defines the yottabyte as 1024^8 bytes - for me that is the key difference. Thunderbird2 (talk) 10:25, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism

Recent "you suck" and derogatory comments were integrated into the article.... I blanked and then reverted the page, therefore removing the offending comments. ---Your friendly neighborhood 24.238.177.246-

"The term "macabtyte" refers to a storage unit used on Apple computers. It appears larger, is in fact smaller but considerably more expensive than the equivalent PC storage unit. Macabytes have a glowing Apple printed on each byte." -- based on some google searching there is no such thing. This looks better fit for uncyclopedia than wikipedia. I am gonna remove it. - 96-35-10-239.dhcp.stls.mo.charter.com July 7 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.35.10.239 (talk) 02:31, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Dude, Google isn't always right, you Apple biggot. (You had to GOOGLE that? What a lamer. How's the pocket protector?) (talk) 02:31, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Obvious vandalism occurring, I suggest that the page gets locked. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.35.10.239 (talk) 02:40, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

AFD

Why does someone want this page on the "Votes for deletion" page?? --Anon

My mistake. I withdrew it. --Dpbsmith 04:09, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"A mole of bytes"

I removed the statement:

"A yottabyte (2⁸⁰ bytes) is about 2.01 moles of bytes."

Unless I'm greatly mistaken, this is nonsense. A mole is a gram-molecular weight, and bytes do not have a molecular weight. The article on mole says:

"[a mole] is defined as the amount of substance of a system that contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon-12. This is known as Avogadro's constant and is approximately 6.02 × 10²³."

Bytes are not a substance. It is not meaningful to speak of "a mole of bytes." Even if it were, it is not at all clear to me how one can derive the stated figure.

If someone wants to reinsert the above statement I request that they give an explanation on this talk page of the meaning of the phrase "a mole of bytes" and that they summarize the calculation that shows that a yottabyte = 2.01 moles. --Dpbsmith 04:09, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I suppose they're trying to say that there's as many bytes in a yottabyte as there are moles in 0.012 kg of C-12? --Dysprosia 04:10, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The out-of-context use of mole comes unexpected, but is essentially correct. This is a typical form of humor. Someone is being dense here, and innumerate besides. Dysprosia's comment is meant humorously too, one might hope…

—Herbee 00:00, 2004 Apr 3 (UTC)

My first chemistry teacher, Mrs. Murray of sainted memory, illustrated the size of a mole by writing Avogadro's number on the board, then placing a dollar sign in front of it. We then computed how much of various commodities this much money could purchase, how many times a "mole of money" could buy and sell Bill Gates, etc. It may have been an abuse of terminology, but it was certainly educational. --Anville 18:45, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

According to http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=mole it would be correct to talk about a mole of bytes. It says Merriam-Webster defines the word as:

Main Entry: 3mole

Variant: also mol /'mOl/

Function: noun

the base unit in the International System of Units for the amount of pure substance that contains the same number of elementary entities as there are atoms in exactly 12 grams of the isotope carbon 12 <a mole of photons> <a mole of sodium chloride>

Under this definition, "mole" is a measure of the number of objects in a collection (like "dozen" or "gross") not a measure of mass (like "kilogram" or "pound"). A mole of photons is just a collection of 6.02×10²³ photons. It doesn't matter that light is not a "substance". It doesn't matter what masses the photons have. All that matters is that there are 6.02×10²³ elementary objects in the collection. So a mole of bytes would be a collection of 6.02×10²³ bytes.

That same URL also gives the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary. That dictionary gives two very different definitions of the term:

mole5 or mol ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ml) n.

1. The amount of a substance that contains as many atoms, molecules, ions, or other elementary units as the number of atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12. The number is 6.0225 × 1023, or Avogadro's number. Also called gram molecule.

2. The mass in grams of this amount of a substance, numerically equal to the molecular weight of the substance. Also called gram-molecular weight. See table at measurement.

Definition 1 is a count, and definition 2 is a mass. A mole(def 1) of bytes is meaningful, but a mole(def 2) of bytes is not. Just as it's meaningful to talk about a dozen bytes, but not about a kilogram of bytes. The number of yottabytes in a mole(def 1) of bytes is calculated by dividing Avagadro's number by 2⁸⁰, which is approximately 2.01.

That ignores the part of all four definitions which say that a mole only has meaning with respect to the "amount of a substance." Bytes are not a substance. I've been trying to figure out any way to reword this, but it is just plain wrong to speak of "a mole of bytes." What is right is to say that it is a pleasant numerical coincidence that Avogadro's number express in binary is approximately the "round" number 2⁷⁹. I'm going to see if I can wordsmith this in some way that preserves the amusing coincidence without saying something incorrect. --Dpbsmith (talk) 22:23, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Are a group of photons a substance? No. Yet the first dictionary definition gave <mole of photons> as one example of a proper use of the word "mole". Many universities and scientists use the phrase "mole of photons" (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22mole+of+photons%22) even though it's clearly not a substance. The dictionary used "substance" for want of a better word, but the example showed they intended it to mean any collection of "elementary units" that can be counted. There was no intent to limit it.

Are a group of electrons a substance? No. Yet the current mole article gives electrons as an example of something you can have a mole of, as does the NIST site defining SI units http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/current.html). You wouldn't normally call a group of electrons a "substance". We wouldn't say that more "substance" was poured into a capacitor as it charged.

Also note that NIST and the article don't just say "amount of substance". They say "amount of substance of a system". If a collection of information is a system, then the bytes will make up the substance of that system. The substance of this argument is that "substance" needn't be limited to chemicals.

Both NIST and the dictionary use the word "substance" as a convenient word for "a bunch of stuff" (especially since it's most often used in chemistry), but the example shows that they didn't intend to limit it to what we'd normally call "substances". Why bother to impose such a limitation? Google searches on "mole of" in quotes turns up in the first few pages many hits on schools and information sites (e.g. chemistry.about.com) that say "mole" can be applied to anything you can count. Common usage appears to be consistent with both NIST and the dictionary. In this case the system is memory, and the elementary unit of the substance of that system is a byte, so a yottabyte is about 2 moles of bytes.

I was interested in if a yottabyte could in principle be carried around in a notebook in the future. For that I calculated the moles of atoms needed if one atom could store one bit of information. Obviously you need 16 moles for that if you mean yobibytes as in this discussion: 2⁸⁰ * 8 / Avogadro constant (for a real yottabyte: 10²⁴ * 8 / Avogadro constant = 13). If one could use hydrogen this would mean 16 grams. No problem. But silicium with an atomic weight of 28.086 would become problematic: 451 g. Let alone a worst case element like the hypothetical ununoctium with an atomic weight of 294: 4.7 kg. So a mole is a useful unit to get an idea about what a yottabyte or yobibyte means.

—WimOckham (talk) 15:57, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Brontobyte

Please provide a reference for Brontobyte. See Talk:SI prefix. --Ian Cairns 23:05, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Brontobyte

What is a brontobyte?? (A link to this word was added to this article.) --66.245.99.179 23:12, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It's what happens to time-travellers who discover that brontosaurus was not really a herbivore. The article on bronto would have you believe otherwise though. — Trilobite (Talk) 06:57, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Brontobyte is covered in Non-SI unit prefix. — Omegatron 22:51, 22 March 2007 (UTC) What on the face of earth is a Brontobyte anyway?Albertgenii12 (talk) 23:38, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I think a Brontobyte is just another big but undefined unit, just like a zillion for numbers. Wikiecam (talk) 23:16, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Brontobyte is 1024 yottabytes, but not (yet) official terminology... Go google for further links and information... 80.4.63.73 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 12:40, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

H2O

I thought that the human body was 70% water. If this is true how can there be more oxygen than hydrogen?

The human body is made up of 65% oxygen by molecular weight, not by number of atoms. Water is mostly hydrogen, although most of its weight comes from oxygen since oxygen is much heavier. — oo64eva (Alex) ^{(U | T | C)} @ June 28, 2005 06:14 (UTC)

Not all the oxygen in the body is from water, nor is all the hydrogen. Hydrogen is a component of virtually every molecule in the body, and oxygen is only slightly less prevalent. There are certainly more hydrogen atoms in the body, but because they are only 1/16th the weight of an oxygen atom, there would have to be 16 times as many hydrogen atoms as oxygen in order to have an equal weight, which there isn't. ---ray- 22:14, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

The number of bytes

This article shows a yottabyte as a nice, even number. But for smaller measurements, it doesn't work out that way. A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes, and following that system, a yottabyte should be 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes. I don't know if that's used for such big, theoretical numbers, though, so I didn't change anything. On a side note, what's the accepted way on Wikipedia to write large numbers? Is it 1,048,576 or 1 048 576? I personally prefer the first, but I'm not going to argue with the SI standard, or whoever determines that. --Twilight Realm 03:28, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, kilobyte actually means either 1000 or 1024, depending on context. I'm not sure if the powers of two corruption extends up into these very large prefixes. There's no official IEC equivalent, but it would probably be "yotbibyte" or something.

In the Wikipedia we use commas instead of the SI standard spaces. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) — Omegatron 14:01, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, a kilobyte is only 1024 bytes, but a kilogram, for example, is 1000 grams. The byte originated with (and so far as I know is used exclusively in relation to) computers, which are based on the binary number system, so it is always used in powers of 2. (The byte itself is 2³ bits) This would be true no matter how far you take it, so a yottabyte would be 2⁸⁰ bytes, but a yottagram, for example, would be 10²⁴ grams. (The moon's mass is about 74 Yg.) This difference is programmed into Google's Calculator. Note the difference between a "1 yottagram in grams" search and a "1 yottabyte in bytes" search. ---ray- 22:14, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

The table in the manual of style indicates that according to IEC 60027, a yottabyte is either 10²⁴ or 2⁸⁰, but a yobibyte is always 2⁸⁰. -Walter Siegmund (talk) 22:31, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A Kibibyte is 1024 bytes (IEC standard). Wynler 15:15, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

100 bytes per atom?

I seriously doubt the entire state of an atom can be described in just 100 bytes. That number strikes me as beingr several orders of magnitude too low... of course with the uncertainty principle the state of an atom can never be fully described so the point is moot. Still it is an oddball arbitrary constant that makes the metaphor a little weird. Maybe it would be worthwhile to find a data structure that can be well-described. Asteron [[User_talk:Asteron|&#12494;&#12524;&#12484;&#12449;]] 03:56, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, you could describe the possibilities of state with quantum mechanics, but even then, 100 bytes would not be enough for this.

Yatta

Any actul reason for the link to Yatta at the bottom of the page? That's just totally unrelated, right? 68.40.186.248 05:50, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. I deleted it. BTW, do you want to join the project? Anyone can edit, but there are advantages to creating an account if you want to contribute regularly. To join, create an account and then introduce yourself to the community at the new user log. Best wishes, Walter Siegmund (talk) 16:46, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Human complexity

Why is the bit about how many yottabytes it would take to store a human relevant whatsoever? It seems like a bit of useless trivia. Nothing wrong with trivia, but there is absolutely no logical connection whatsoever between yottabytes and human complexity. MOF 09:01, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

The Yottabyte is such an astoundingly large number, that for most people, its shear size is hard to grasp. By using the molecular scale, this analogy is an attempt to frame the size of the yottabyte in a more practical sense. — oo64eva (Alex) ^{(U | T | C)} @ 05:33, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Sorry about that, I didn't mean to click the save page button. I went ahead and reverted it back. 8.10.128.50 21:59, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

It also adds a bit of flavor to an otherwise bland article. Flame0001 21:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

It adds a bit of useless and dubious trivia to an otherwise accurate article, you mean. — Omegatron 21:10, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Nothing wrong with a little trivia. AllStarZ 23:19, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Can whatever-it-was be put back please? Jackiespeel 17:43, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

i'm for it remaining and as that make five votes for it remaining against two for removing it i'm putting it back.J.L.Main 10:18, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

In his 1995 book 'Physics of Star Trek', Prof Lawrence M Krauss looked at the difficulties involved in transporting a person in the manner suggested by Star Trek. He pointed out that the human body contained a Yottabyte of data to be transported. Writing in 1995 he also pointed out that to store this amount of data in 1995 would involve a pile of hard drives that "From Earth, you'd have to stack 100-gigabyte hard drives a third of the way to the center of the Milky Way or so to hold it all. And at current information transfer rates, it would take longer than the age of the universe to transmit that much data. " http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-trek-movie-science/ Star Trek is of interest to a lot of people so I suggest this connection is hardly trivia. I'd also suggest that from a real world technological view, the example above shows just how data has condensed in the last twenty years and how it is likely to continue to do so. I've seen references to 1TB memory cards so suggest the example of Giza be reduced accordingly.--Robata (talk) 18:42, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Is this possible

Is there any super computers in a world that have atleast a yottabyte? I think that that would be a good thing to add to this article if there is. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ncusa367 (talk • contribs) 19:17, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

There's not. Useight 22:56, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

It will be possible after, probably 50 years, when satellites have computers strong enough to transmitt stuff from Jupiter.Albertgenii12 (talk) 23:39, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Everything in the universe

I removed the statement "It has been theorized that everything in the entire universe could be stored in one yottabyte of data."

For one thing, who is it that theorizes this? The user who put this in here? A scientist? A school teacher? Also, this statement has no meaning. A Yottabyte is a unit of binary storage, not matter. Assuming that the user meant that the entire universe could be described with one yottabyte of data, that user would have to be more specific. If one wants to digitally render a 3D environment of the entire universe, it would take a lot more than 1 yottabyte... a hell of a lot more. If one wanted a 1 kb description of every single atom in the universe then again, this would take up orders of magnitude more than a yottabyte. If however someone wanted a small description of every body in the universe larger than 4 grams, then perhaps a yottabyte would be adequate. It all depends. — oo64eva (Alex) ^{(U | T | C)} @ 06:00, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Oops! I forgot to remove that when I removed a link to a personal website that had that "theory" on it. Thanks for catching it. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me Please review me!} 06:01, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Ten year prediction

Utah Governor Herbert on June 11, 2012 told the annual meeting of the National Governors' Association that the NSA's 1,500,000 square foot data center being built outside Salt Lake City will be the first facility to house a yottabyte of data. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.247.128.78 (talk) 20:58, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

First reference predicts 1 Zettabyte of data by 2010. The second reference claims to predict 1 Yottabyte of data by 2010. Since the second reference is incomplete, conflicts with the first and looks like an error, I removed it. — Shinhan < talk > 11:43, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Some re-added this. I agree with your original assessment and have re-removed the second statement. 137.148.142.199 (talk) 18:38, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

And I have re-added it again, but I put the quotation in the reference. Two sources making different projections isn't a valid a reason to remove sourced content, just because the two projections happen to disagree. Both are valid. If anything, the text in the article could be rephrased to say that the projection by 2010 ranges between a zettabyte and a yottabyte, depending on the study. ~Amatulić (talk) 20:24, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm removing the claim. To reach a zettabyte by 2010 is feasible, a yottabyte is not, as it is way too much. Think about it, if all 1.5 billion Internet users had a 1 Terrabyte drive with all the disk space used up then that is only 1.5 zettabytes, WAY OFF the scale of a yottabyte. It may happen in 20 years however.--70.65.245.94 (talk) 01:52, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

'Practical' application of the yottabyte

This article says "[a yottabyte] holds enough memory to record a [=one] humans entire life conversation" but the article on exabyte says that "Mark Liberman calculated the storage requirements for all human speech [i.e. "all words ever spoken by human beings"] at 42 zettabytes, if digitized as 16 kHz 16-bit audio" and that "a project at the UC Berkeley School of Information" calculated it at 5 exabytes, probably (says Liberman) "thinking of text". As the claim in this article is unsourced, I'm removing it altogether until someone finds a more credible and sourced estimate.84.53.74.196 08:41, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

A number of articles suggest that the U.S. government is working towards achieving yottabyte capability. In fact, a number of them suggest it just for the NSA's $2B Utah storage facility alone. Combined with a number of well-argued articles that suggest various departments of the gov't (including merely the NSA spies) desire things such as the (headline:) "'Total Information Awareness' Data Mining Program" and even complete data storage (including all video and (including telephone) audio. Some of the department heads have in fact admitted pretty close to wanting (or having) exactly that, despite being cancelled by Congress. Suggest that arena (storage of all human electronic communication) be looked at when looking for potential 'practical' applications (or comparisons) for the yottabyte. See also the NSA discussion below.
--68.127.92.76 (talk) 19:43, 6 July 2013 (UTC)Doug bashford

Merge request, plus criticism

I'm of the opinion that practically all of the descriptions of the separate measurement units ought to be folded under one or a few articles describing the measurement system as a whole. As in "Le Système International d'Unités"/"International System of Units", and perhaps an article on "Metric Prefixes" in addition. The separate concepts should perhaps be kept as redirections to the relevant article, or WikiMedia's search functionality should be augmented to with some sort of extra-topic tagging functionality to redirect searches for such terms into their proper location in the relevant page. Anyway, it seems to me pretty weird and unencyclopaedic to list terms such as this one as a separate article.

Secondly, even if nothing of the above sort is ever undertaken, I think it's plainly wrong to say that the binary suffixes have simply been "suggested". After all, following the links even now present in this very article, it's easy to see that IEEE -- one of the foremost standardisers in the world, in charge of standards like FireWire and Ethernet -- has formally, by ballot, accepted such suffixes as recognized nomenclature. Granted, IEEE does not have a UN mandate like ISO/IEC/ITU and the lot do. But nevertheless, it should be recognized as much in the computer science and electrical engineering field as, say ITU-T -- in actual fact the latter body's standardisation efforts tend to lead to technical practice that is theoretical, as opposed to its widely practical counterpart in IETF and IEEE practice.

Decoy (talk) 22:37, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

There is already such an article: Binary prefix.

I don't see "suggested" on the page, but please do feel free to replace it with whatever is appropriate. Be bold :) shreevatsa (talk) 00:02, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

NSA Article

Here is an article about a potential NSA data center with storage at the yottabyte level. Might be worth having in the article. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231 —NMajdan•talk 03:30, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I also think this should be added, especially since the article is very misleading, in that it claims no storage system or network is even close to one thousandth of a yottabyte. More recent articles about NSA might be helpful as well. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1 66.44.26.250 (talk) 21:48, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Another reference is in the 4/24/12 Network World issue article BackSpin by Mark Gibbs http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2012/042312-backspin.htmlGorilla 70 (talk) 16:45, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I think the statement about the Utah Data Center should be removed or significantly toned down. The articles do not state a concrete plan for the data center to store or even process a yottabyte. Further discussion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Utah_Data_Center#Yottabytes.3F JedKBrown (talk) 14:57, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Section should be removed entirely, as it's patently ridiculous to even entertain the notion of a single yottabyte data center, much less one that can supposedly store multiple yottabytes. Buying enough hard drives to store that much information would both: bankrupt the entire world and take up, at minimum, if you used 4 terabyte hard drives stacked end to end and not including cabling, 120 square miles of space.

I disagree. So the government's super-secret development scientists from the "new Manhattan Project," inspired by the 9-11 hysteria at the "Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee [where] Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building..." 4 TB HDs like those at Costco perhaps!? Quote: "Section should be removed entirely, as it's patently ridiculous to even entertain the notion..." Oh brother. Thank goodness Wiki frowns on dogmatic absolutist Orwellian mind-censorship such as that. Remove even the discussion!? Remove the freedom to think!? How Dark Ages!

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lead section) quote: The lead should be able to stand alone as a concise overview of the article. It should define the topic, establish context, explain why the subject is interesting or notable, and summarize the most important points—including any prominent controversies. -end quote.

Given the growing interest in NSA & gov't spying on Americans, and growing of number of "yottabyte" articles on just the Utah storage facility, and it is scheduled to come online in 2 months, one can only predict greater public interest. (Bluffdale Utah, + others are for storage, and NSA HQ + others are for processing it, ...at least 10 super-linked data centers.)

quote: The magnitude of the agency's data storage reserves at Bluffdale all but defy comprehension. And it appears even that capacity will meet only part of the NSA's needs." "...As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes of data." denverpost.com See also at examiner.com: "NSA $2 billion Utah-based facility can process yottabytes of information" and another quote: "Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed." ...and many other articles that address the various impossibility arguments presented here.

Just the storage facility at Utah has an electrical power plant TODAY that could power 40,000 homes. That's worthy of slow contemplation as well as intelligent rhetorical manipulation (comparisons/description). Please no more Costco-like or 1 TB thumb-drive-comparison arguments. No more poor man's rhetoric such as "ridiculous." We are talking Oak Ridge just for starters, and when that calculation is done, then factor in Moore's Law on steroids. This is not rocket science, yet an intelligent discussion is not yet to be found on a silver platter as far as I can tell. Yet Wiki policy suggests it be covered.
--68.127.92.76 (talk) 18:50, 6 July 2013 (UTC)Doug Bashford

"Please no more Costco-like or 1 TB thumb-drive-comparison arguments." <- It's not a comparison just for comparison's sake, dude. It's literally what it would take to build one yottabyte of storage, given today's technology. Even if we give the government a little credit and say that they're working with 40 terabyte hard drives, which is ten times the storage available to the public on one hard drive, then they would still need 25 billion hard drives to store that much information. This isn't a case of "let's entertain the notion for argument's sake." This is a case of "there is no way to set up and manage a facility of that size with today's technology. Period. No arguments." A discussion of the data center itself isn't a problem, but discussing its supposed ability to store an amount of data that isn't feasible with current technology contributes absolutely nothing to said discussion.

Also, if you want more evidence of how ridiculous such an idea is, consider power consumption. You said the facility can give enough power to juice up 40,000 homes just by itself. Well let's just try some calculations here. A 4 terabyte, 7200 RPM drive from Hitachi draws 7.3 watts while idling. Multiply this by the 250 billion hard drives you would need in order to get 1 yottabyte, and that comes out to an average power draw while idle of 1,825,000,000,000 watts. If we convert this into more familiar units, then we get 1,825,000 megawatts. Now, there are 8,765 hours in a year. If we multiply this by our power draw, we get the total power draw for the drives if we were to run them 24/7/365, as they would be run in a data center. When we do this, we get 15,996,125,000 megawatt-hours in one year. For comparison's sake, the total annual electricity draw of the entire United States is only 3.88 billion MW-hrs/year. The entire world is 19.3 billion MW-hrs/year. Now do you see how patently ridiculous this whole thing is? The energy requirements fall a little bit short of what it takes to power "40,000 homes." To power *just the hard drives,* not including any cooling equipment, lights, anything else in the facility, would require 3/4s of the annual energy output of the entire world! And then some places want to scale that up to 2+ yottabytes? Do you see the problem here?

What is the next order of magnitude

It seems interesting to me that ALL the xxxxabyte articles were created WAY back in 2001 when a Yottabyte must have seemed infeasible; yet now in 2010 it still exists but there is nothing beyond it. By now there should be names allocated for at LEAST two more orders higher, that is, to be proportional to what we had in 2001. I'm surprised this was never deleted. Daniel Christensen (talk) 07:17, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

What are you talking about?--Spectatorbot13 (talk) 22:38, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

We haven't yet found a use for words describing higher orders of magnitude. If you read some of the other comments on this page, you'll see we're quite far away from creating storage media capable of containing anywhere close to one yottabyte.

Edit: I looked into it further and found this site. It claims that the next two are "brontobyte" and "geopbyte".-Nick Klose (T/C) 20:36, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

These should then be added to WP accordingly, and added to the orders of magnitude scale as well. As I'm sure I haven't been the only one coming to WP looking for more info about sizes bigger than Yottabyte, regardless of their presumed massive size, if they exist then they should appear here. Jimthing (talk) 21:44, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

misleading table entry

The "binary usage" column of the table gives the impression that 1 YB = 2^80 bytes. No reference is cited for this use either in the template or in the yottabyte article. Indeed the yottabyte article does not even mention this use. The template needs to be edited to avoid giving this misleading impression. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 11:29, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

This reference says "exabyte EB s⁶⁰ bytes. This reference lists yottabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, gigabyte etc all with power of two values. I must remind you that you have been told not to push your PoV about binary prefixes on Wikipedia. Glider87 (talk) 06:25, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Edit request on 17 December 2011

Could a link to the Dutch version be added?: nl:Yottabyte

WimOckham (talk) 14:20, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Done --Jnorton7558 (talk) 22:06, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

What percentage of the internet is porn? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.209.144.93 (talk) 20:49, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Etymology?

Is there any information available on who named this unit and when? Does "yotta" come from "yotta,yotta, yotta," meaning blah,blah,blah? Or from iota? Or?211.225.33.104 (talk) 05:16, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

The prefix was named in 1991. See Yotta. It is unlikely that the word came from "blah, blah" since science is not colloquial business. Nevertheless, the etymology for yotta should go on the yotta page. Piguy101 (talk) 23:54, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

It appears that the prefix comes from the Greek οκτώ (októ), meaning eight, because it is equal to 1000^8. Piguy101 (talk) 00:00, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

You mean yada yada which could be translated as fuck fuck. --92.214.160.127 (talk) 13:36, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Xenottabyte? Shilentnobyte? Domegemegrottebyte?

What comes next after Yottabyte?

Are these candidates for next after Yottabyte real? Are there other names?

Xenottabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)

Shilentnobyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)

Domegemegrottebyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/9/11/how-big-is-a-petabyte-exabyte-zettabyte-or-a-yottabyte.html

They are indeed all real and there are terms for two higher orders of magnitude above a Domegemegrottobyte as well.

Icosebyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Monoicosebyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

https://twitter.com/verizonnews/status/553944360308719617?lang=en (That was the highest unit of data in use in 2015. Note, however, that he refers to not only the terms you used but also the two I mentioned. All 5 terms are real, but there is no named terms for anything more than a Monoicosebyte (Such as 1000/1024 Monoicosebytes).24.127.197.176 (talk) 04:27, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Tape Storage?

What about tape storage. This article mentions Terabyte drives and microSD cards. How about how many data tapes would it take to make up one Yottabyte? Sure enough this bit of trivia would be useful for this article. As the hard drive and SD card analogy made it here. 66.188.81.70 (talk) 21:41, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Update the Area Required to Store Yottabyte

Hi!

"In 2010, it was estimated that storing a yottabyte on terabyte-size hard drives would require one million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.[1] If 200 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to the public as of early 2015) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 800000 cubic meters, or the volume of 32 percent of the Great Pyramid of Giza."

Please can someone keep an eye on this section and update it as memory becomes more compressed? If they are Micros SDXC then it appears from

http://www.picstop.co.uk/memory-cards/sdxc-memory-card?page=3

and http://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Extreme-512GB-Memory-SDSDXPA-512G-G46/dp/B010510SEQ/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1435359174&sr=1-2&keywords=sdxc-cards+512

that the capacity of publically available memory chips has doubled to 512GB. I presume that reduces the volume of space required to one sixth of the Great Pyramid?Robata (talk) 22:54, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

I've found another link to 512GB https://www.sandisk.com/home/memory-cards/sd-cards/extremepro-sd-uhs-i. I've taken the liberty of reducing the size reference. Robata — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robata (talk • contribs) 21:31, 5 January 2017 (UTC) My edit appears to have been removed. I have revised the paragraph to make the reason for its inclusion clearer, which is that the move from 1YB taking up an area the size of the Great Pyramid to that of mobile structures such as the Hindenburg (or twice the Titanic's footprint, or less than the largest cruise ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Oasis_of_the_Seas) indicate that this previously unfathomably large amount of memory can in modern times be practically stored and used. If you want to make that point clearer, fine. But I think it needs making.Robata (talk) 22:30, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Decimal vs binary meanings of 'terabyte'

There is a discussion of the decimal and binary meanings of 'terabyte' at Talk:Terabyte#Disputed_references. The discussion has possible implications for this page. If you wish to comment, please do so on the terabyte talk page. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 10:54, 29 July 2015 (UTC)