Exbibyte to Megabyte

EB (exabyte) = 10¹⁸ bytes (SI decimal). EiB (exbibyte) = 2⁶⁰ bytes = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes (IEC binary). EiB is 15.29% larger. This is the largest practically significant SI vs IEC discrepancy: per exbibyte, the binary value exceeds the decimal value by approximately 152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes — about 152.9 petabytes.

One exbibyte (EiB) ≈ 1.153 × 10¹⁸ bytes = 1,073,741,824 GiB = 1,048,576 TiB. In practical terms: enough to store approximately 230 billion JPEG photos at 5 MB each, or 288,230,376 copies of a 4 GB HD movie, or the entire text content of the English internet many thousands of times over.

In theory, yes — and with astonishing density. DNA can encode about 215 PiB per gram of material, meaning a single EiB could fit in roughly 4.7 grams of synthetic DNA. Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have demonstrated writing and reading megabytes of data in DNA strands. The challenges are speed and cost: current DNA synthesis writes about 400 bytes per second and costs around $3,500 per megabyte. At that rate, writing 1 EiB would take billions of years and cost more than global GDP. However, enzymatic synthesis breakthroughs could reduce costs by 6–8 orders of magnitude within decades.

Storing 1 EiB on modern HDDs would require roughly 57,000 drives of 20 TB each, consuming about 400–500 kW of power just for the drives — plus 200–300 kW for cooling, networking, and overhead. That totals roughly 6 GWh per year, equivalent to powering about 550 US homes. At typical US grid carbon intensity, this produces around 2,500 tonnes of CO₂ annually. Hyperscale operators reduce this via renewable energy and immersion cooling, but the fundamental physics of spinning magnetic platters or maintaining NAND charge states sets a floor on energy consumption that no software optimisation can eliminate.

After exbibyte (EiB, 2⁶⁰ bytes) come: zebibyte (ZiB, 2⁷⁰ bytes) and yobibyte (YiB, 2⁸⁰ bytes), as defined in IEC 80000-13. These are recognized standard units but have no current practical applications. The entire global internet's estimated stored data (hundreds of EB) is still in the low hundreds of EiB range — well short of one ZiB.

A JPEG photo from a modern smartphone is typically 3–8 MB depending on resolution and compression settings. A RAW format photo from a DSLR or mirrorless camera is 20–50 MB per shot. A PNG screenshot at full HD (1920×1080) is about 1–3 MB; a compressed JPEG screenshot may be under 200 kB.

Video data usage depends heavily on quality: SD video uses roughly 700 MB per hour; HD (1080p) uses 1.5–3 GB per hour; 4K uses 7–20 GB per hour. These are byte-based measurements. In terms of bitrate: SD ≈ 1.5 Mbps, HD ≈ 5–8 Mbps, 4K ≈ 15–25 Mbps — where the "b" is bits, requiring division by 8 to convert to MB/s.

Compression algorithms like ZIP, GZIP, and ZSTD find and eliminate redundancy in data. Typical ratios vary dramatically by file type: plain text compresses to 20–30% of original size (a 10 MB log file becomes 2–3 MB); source code compresses to 25–35%; office documents (DOCX, XLSX) are already ZIP-compressed internally, so re-compressing gains little. JPEG, MP3, and H.264 video are already lossy-compressed and typically shrink by less than 5% with ZIP. A 100 MB folder of mixed files typically compresses to 40–60 MB. The key principle: compression removes statistical redundancy, so already-compressed or random data cannot be reduced further.

MB (megabyte) = 1,000,000 bytes (SI decimal). MiB (mebibyte) = 1,048,576 bytes (IEC binary). The difference is about 4.9%. Windows historically displayed storage in binary units but labelled them as "MB" — confusingly. Since Windows Vista, Microsoft has used the binary calculation consistently. macOS switched to SI decimal units in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009), matching the way hard drive manufacturers measure capacity.

Approximate data consumption per hour: web browsing = 60–100 MB, social media scrolling = 100–300 MB, music streaming (Spotify standard) = 40–50 MB, video calls (Zoom standard quality) = 300–500 MB, YouTube HD = 1,500–3,000 MB. These are rough averages and vary by content, settings, and network conditions.