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

1ZB is equal to around 1.1 trillion gigabytes, with XO Communications saying that 2016 could be 'the year of the zettabyte'

@anthony256

Published Sep 27, 2014 11:45 PM CDT
Updated Nov 3, 2020 1:14 PM CST

33 seconds read time

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.

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

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%.

NEWS SOURCE:storageeffect.media.seagate.com

Anthony Garreffa

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.