2016 is 'year of the zettabyte', with 1ZB equal to ~1.1 trillion GB

Seagate's Twitter account just blasted something both truly exciting, and incredibly terrifying: the first real tease of the zettabyte. Seagate posted XO Communications' infographic on the Zettabyte, or ZB.

To put things into perspective, 1ZB is around 1.1 trillion GB - yes, 1.1 trillion gigabytes. The infographic, above, says that according to Cisco's Visual Networking Index, the "world will cross the Zettabyte threshold of data transferred annually via the Internet by the end of 2016". To put things into an even scarier perspective, 1PB (Petabyte) is 1024TB (Terabyte), and 1EX (Exabyte) is 1024PB, so 1ZB is an insane 1024EB, which is just scary.

What is driving this Zettabyte amount of data? Internet video, with around 55% of Internet video expected to chew up 99% of all Internet traffic in 2016. The remaining 44% is split between web/data with 23%, and file sharing with 21%.