zibibyte

A zibibyte (ZiB) is a unit of digital information storage. It is one of the binary prefixes, representing a quantity of data based on powers of 2. Specifically, a zibibyte is equal to 2^70 bytes. This is equivalent to 1,024 yobibytes, 1,024^7 kibibytes, or 1,024^7 standard bytes.

The term zibibyte was introduced by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1998 as part of a set of binary prefixes. These prefixes were created to distinguish between powers of 1000 (used in SI prefixes like gigabyte or terabyte) and powers of 1024 (used in computing for memory and storage). While SI prefixes are commonly used in marketing storage capacity, binary prefixes are often used in technical contexts and by operating systems to represent actual storage sizes.

In practical terms, a zibibyte is an extremely large unit of data. Its usage is primarily theoretical or in discussions of future storage capacities, as current consumer-grade storage devices do not reach this scale. For reference, 1 zibibyte is approximately equal to 1.18 x 10^21 bytes, or about one sextillion bytes.