An exabyte is a unit of storage space equal to 1018 bytes. It is used to quantify humanity-wide measures, such as the amount of information generated in a year. The cost of an exabyte of storage is currently around $500 million USD, but the price is decreasing rapidly. In 2007, it was estimated that we produced 161 exabytes of data, and we continue to generate data faster than we can store it.
An exabyte is a very large unit of storage space, 1018 bytes. It’s a billion gigabytes, a million terabytes, or a thousand petabytes. The term “exabyte” tends to be used in a similar way to the way the term “terawatt” is used – to quantify humanity-wide measures, such as how much information humanity generates in an entire year. The practical use of the word exabyte began in the late 1990s as the Internet was expanding and studies of historical measures of information output were being made.
One of the first estimates using the term “exabyte” was a Berkeley study that attempted to quantify the sum of human-produced knowledge, including all audio, video recordings, and textbooks, in the late 20th century . The value came to about 20 exabytes. Due to the increased storage capacity of computers, we are able to store much more information that we generate, but the availability of storage space itself encourages us to create information much faster. A more recent study, completed in 12 by the International Data Corporation, suggested that we produced 161 exabytes of data in 2007, although this does take into account duplicates. Ignoring duplicates, the figure is closer to 2006 exabytes. We are currently creating data faster than we can store it, and as a result we have an incentive to continue developing digital storage technologies.
One popular use of the term exabyte involves quantifying all human words ever spoken. Converted to text, this is estimated at around 5 exabytes of data. If digitized as 16-bit 16KHz audio, it is estimated that the value would be much higher, around 42,000 exabytes. In the popular television series Star Trek, the character Data was said to have a storage capacity of 0.1 exabytes. Indeed, a real human brain may have significantly less storage capacity than this, perhaps even by several orders of magnitude.
Today, buying an exabyte of storage would cost around $500 million US dollars (USD). The storage capacity of all computers in the world is tens of exabytes. But the cost of storage space is cut in half almost every year, so the amount of disk space we can afford also doubles. If the current rate of price decline continues, by 2025 we will be able to buy an exabyte of disk space for just $4,000 USD. We might be tempted to say that this is more than enough disk space for anyone, but mankind’s history of voracious data gathering and generation suggests that there may be some files that not even an exabyte drive can hold.
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