Exabyte

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What Does Exabyte Mean?

An exabyte (EB) is a unit of digital information storage used to denote the size of data. It is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes (GB), 1,000 petabytes (PB) or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (B).

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Techopedia Explains Exabyte

The prefix "exa" is part of the International System of Units (SI), and means 1018 units. Hard disk manufacturers label their products in SI units, which may confuse some people in the IT field. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) all recommend using the exbibyte (EiB) unit, which signifies 260 bytes and is more accurate for the measure of bytes.

Two interpretations can be made using the two standards:

  • Using SI, one exabyte is equivalent to 1,000 petabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
  • Using traditional binary measurement, one exabyte is equivalent to 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, that’s 260 bytes, also equivalent to 1 exbibyte.
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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ??a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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