Because yottabytes were no longer enough, new prefixes were adopted a few days ago not far from Paris.
According to some experts, in less than 7 years, the whole of humanity should generate no less than one yottabyte of data every year. The yottabyte is the largest unit of measurement currently "available" if we put aside certain attempts to go further, such as the hellaByte and the brontoByte. It represents one billion petabytes or one million billion gigabytes. In other words, it's a 1 with 24 zeros behind it or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yes, that's a lot of data and yet by 2030, this unit of measurement should be completely outdated.
To remedy the situation, representatives of the different countries of the world met on November 18 at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) organized near Paris. Reported by Nature, the objective was to validate the first revision of the international system of weights and measures, which had not been updated since 1991 with the introduction of the prefixes yotta (1024) and zetta (1021) on one side, and yocto (10-24) and zepto (10-21) on the other. These representatives agreed on four new names to take into account the new needs and it will now be possible to speak of quetaoctet when you go to buy your next hard disk, with a capacity of a billion billion terabytes: you should be able to store vacation photos!
The prefixes ronna (1027) and queta (1030) for the infinitely large have been retained, as well as ronto (10-27) and quecto (10-30) at the other end of the spectrum.
