Let‘s start with a simple enough analogy we can all visualize firsthand – the humble terabyte, TB for short. Your shiny new laptop or gaming console likely boasts storage capacity measured in the terabytes – mine has a one TB solid state drive installed. Now think through what would need to happen for me to accumulate one thousand additional identical high performance TB drives somehow. That gets us into the petabyte, PB, neighborhood.
Already, that small server room packed floor to ceiling with top-end drives adds up to an amount of storage space the average user will never come close to fully utilizing in their lifetime. But let‘s take another complete order of magnitude leap – stack up one thousand more rooms just like it! I‘d probably need to commandeer an entire warehouse at that point for all the requisite infrastructure.
Welcome to the world of the zettabyte – an exponentially staggering scale that was once as relatively inconceivable to early computing pioneers as the terabyte once seemed to the floppy disk generation. In this guide, we‘ll cover everything you need to know about this bafflingly massive measurement unit – from what defines a zettabyte precisely, to just how gobsmackingly huge it really is, who on earth is using them today, and whether average users need to care yet. Let‘s dive in!
A Brief History of Data Storage Explosion
The prefixes we use to denote orders of magnitude in computing – kilo, mega, giga etc – originate from decimal-based metric system prefixes used in science and engineering for centuries. But as digital storage demand increased exponentially throughout the rise of modern computing from the 1940s onward, we rapidly burned through metric scales that sufficed for other applications but now seemed almost toy-sized against insatiable data generation!
By the early 90s, consumer PCs with ~500 megabyte hard drives felt cavernous. Just a decade later, 20-40 gigabyte drives were the norm. And so the cycle continued, as software and media complexity grew hand in hand with hardware capabilities. Transferring a few MP3 songs felt like an eternity on a dial up modem – broadband made streaming HD video viable.
Each iteration moved the goalposts for what seemed like an unimaginable data volume at the time – until it simply became the new normal baseline a few years later! Here‘s a quick history of how we arrived at truly astronomical scales like zettabytes :
1950s – Commercial computer systems measure primary storage in kilobytes – first magnetic HDDs hold just a few KB
1960s – Megabyte emerges as common unit – microcomputers with MB capacities released
1970s – FLOPPY disks make megabytes portable – drive capacities hit low GB range
1980s – Desktop towers with ~500 MB HDDs + CD-ROMs introduced
1990s – Gigabytes allow increasingly complex applications + media – HDDs reach 10+ GB
2000s – Consumer laptops ship with 100+ GB drives – PS3 launched with Blu-Ray up to 50 GB per disk
2010s – Terabytes in mainstream PCs enable HD video collections + gaming – cloud storage grows
2020s – Data center expansion uses petabytes/exabytes – zettabytes on horizon!
So in just 70 years, we‘ve gone from celebrating the first commercial computers that used a few kilobytes …all the way to anticipating the first machines that may someday support one thousand exabytes! And a key driver through all these exponential leaps has been the perpetual demand for MORE from end users – more speed, more features, better graphics, higher resolution, bigger worlds, more immersive experiences.
Which brings us to today – big data sets, AI machine learning systems, global internet traffic etc already push boundaries through the petabyte era. We now stand on the frontier of the greatest frontier yet – the zettabyte phase of computing history!
Defining a Zettabyte Precisely
We‘ve covered the history – but let‘s define zettabytes rigorously too! Formally, one zettabyte (ZB) is equivalent to:
- 10^21 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
- One trillion (10^12) gigabytes
- One billion (10^9) terabytes
- One thousand exabytes
That stack of warehouse server rooms? Make it a thousand times taller and we‘d be getting oddly close to visualizing a full zettabyte!
Or in table form for easy reference:
| Unit | Abbreviation | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Kilobyte | KB | 10^3 |
| 1 Megabyte | MB | 10^6 |
| 1 Gigabyte | GB | 10^9 |
| 1 Terabyte | TB | 10^12 |
| 1 Petabyte | PB | 10^15 |
| 1 Exabyte | EB | 10^18 |
| 1 Zettabyte | ZB | 10^21 |
Already getting hard to grasp? Let‘s explore just how mind-bendingly huge these units really are.
Just How Massive is a Zettabyte?
My terabyte laptop drive can store about 500 full HD movies. 500 petabytes would cover every film ever released worldwide. So one zettabyte could store the equivalent of 500 billion Hollywood blockbuster movies! If you somehow managed to watch over 140 movies back to back every single day, it would still take 100 million years to get through them all!
Or for another comparison – Facebook currently stores an estimated 300 million terabytes (0.3 exabytes) worth of images, videos and associated metadata in its data warehouses. It‘s one of the largest personal multimedia collections which humanity has ever assembled in history! Yet it would fit easily into just a small fraction of a single zettabyte with room to spare.
Here are some more staggering datapoints that give a sense of scale:
5 billion people uploading 50 photos + videos per day works out to multiple zettabytes of new data created globally each year
The estimated total of all words spoken by humans across all of history clocks in comfortably under an exabyte – a zettabyte could capture a thousand parallel versions of our collective history!
All text data available online today is estimated at just 50-100 petabytes – Wikipedia in its entirety is less than 50 terabytes
I think you get the point – we‘re talking astronomical figures here! But we didn‘t arrive at these measurement units arbitrarily – already petabyte and exabyte-level systems are becoming more common than you might expect…
Who‘s Using Zettabyte Scale Storage Today?
Given it‘s still an obscure, unfamiliar term to most, you may be shocked to hear some massive entities today are already pushing up against the limits of zettabyte-level data warehouses!
For example – American web giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud together offer millions of customers cloud-hosted storage/computing with a shared capacity aggregating over an exabyte already as of 2021! And still adding more data centers at staggering pace.
Focus just on Amazon – analysts at their 2017 annual AWS summit estimated that at rates then already observed, their cloud storage offerings alone would exceed one zettabyte by 2021! Likely an underestimate given their growth trajectory. That represents just a slice of all data they host – retail, streaming, Alexa etc. included!
Or consider advanced scientific research applications – the Large Hadron Collider at CERN generates tens of petabytes of collision event data annually. Square Kilometer Array telescopes currently under construction will compile exabyte-scale radio astronomy sky maps. The Human Genome Project open access database hit its first zettabyte this year!
Even video surveillance – China‘s Skynet urban camera networks amass estimated tens of exabytes per city given the cameras‘ quantity, resolution and constant operation. They‘re already bumping up against fundamental limits of how much footage operators can feasibly sift through and process.
So while still highly rarefied scales today, we‘re clearly entering an era where zettabytes represent meaningful system design targets – and will only become more common in the coming decade!
When Will Average Users Care About Zettabytes?
If you‘re just an everyday laptop or smartphone user though, high-performance computing on this astronomical level probably still seems almost sci-fi and academic. When will zettabytes come to affect your personal tech?
Not for a good while yet! Consider that even bleeding-edge enthusiast PC builds today rarely exceed 10-20 terabyte internal storage footprints. The world‘s largest commercial hard disk drives tap out at around ~16TB. Most consumer solid state drives (SSDs) max out below 8TB.
Network bandwidth is still the bigger bottleneck – residential multi-gigabit connections only just emerged, but still nowhere near necessary throughput to fill drives beyond ~100 terabytes quickly. Deploying petabyte-scale storage banks requires racks of enterprise gear.
However, it‘s undeniable that consumer hardware capabilities have always followed the trajectory blazed by pioneering industrial use cases. Witness products like SSDs transitioning from $100,000+ scientific tools to affordable home PC commodities remarkably rapidly.
So as leading organizations continue pushing terabytes into obsolescence in favor of petabyte platforms, expect zettabyte class hardware itself to achieve economies of scale. Perhaps commodity zettabyte mobiles and laptops are still decades away …but global data appetite shows no signs of slowing its exponential trajectory!
In closing – whether we‘ll accumulate a digital hoard vast enough to one day need multi-billion TB devices locally remains speculative. But rest assured the underlying mega-scale infrastructure will not only arrive shortly – it will unleash transformative new possibilities at a societal level just as past leaps did! After all – a modern smartphone packs more computing into a pocket than a warehouse supercomputer bank did in the 80s.
The zettabyte era is just the latest leap along tech‘s inevitable march. And science fiction has a pesky way of becoming mundane reality before long 🙂
