Most people don’t spend time thinking about the smallest units of data, bits and bytes. But when it comes to data transfer or storage, most of us are concerned with the megabytes, gigabytes, or even terabytes. As data capacity increases, what size hard drive should you be looking for next?
Data generally uses SI (International System of Units) prefixes, basically the artist formerly known as the metric system. Following this system, tera- is the fourth power of 1000. The prefix after tera- should be 10005, or peta-. Therefore, after terabyte comes petabyte. Next is exabyte, then zettabyte and yottabyte. However, binary does not operate on the same scale as SI. It is measured as powers of two rather than powers of ten. When computer scientists first started talking in terms of large amounts of data, they just rounded to the nearest SI prefix. Sometimes, technology manufacturers still round to powers of 1000 but are actually talking about powers of 1024 (which is 210). Special binary prefixes have been made up to correspond to powers of 1024 rather than 1000, but they’re not used consistently. When a hard drive says it has a capacity of 1 terabyte (TB), 10004, it might actually be 1 tebibyte (TiB), or 10244. Binary prefixes go kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, tebi-, pebi-. So what comes after terabyte? Petabyte. But in some cases it may more accurately be called a pebibyte.