What are Practical Appliations for Exabytes?
An exabyte is a very large unit of storage space, 1018 bytes. It is a billion gigabytes, a million terabytes, or a thousand petabytes. The term “exabyte” tends to be used in a way similar to the way the term “terawatt” is used – to quantify humanity-wide measures, such as the amount of information humanity generates in a full year. Practical use of the word exabyte started in the late 90s, as the Internet was ballooning in size and studies were being done on historical measures of information production. One of the first estimates that used the term “exabyte” was a Berkeley study attempting to quantify the sum of human-produced knowledge, including all audio, video recordings and text/books, at the end of the 20th century. The value came in at about 12 exabytes. Due to the increased storage capacity of computers, we are able to store much more of the information we generate, but the availability of the storage space itself encourages us to create information much faster. A more recent
