Exbibyte

An exbibyte (EiB) is a unit of data storage equal to 2⁶⁰ bytes, or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes. It measures data at the same scale as an exabyte, but has a binary prefix instead of a decimal prefix.

An exbibyte is slightly larger than an exabyte (EB), which is 10¹⁸ bytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes); an exbibyte is roughly 1.1529 exabytes. An exbibyte is 1,024 pebibytes, and 1,024 exbibytes make up a zebibyte.

Due to historical naming conventions in the computer industry, which used decimal (base 10) prefixes for binary (base 2) measurements, the common definition of a measurement could mean different numbers. When computer engineers first began using the term kilobyte to refer to a binary measurement of 2¹⁰ bytes (1,024 bytes), the difference between binary and decimal measurements was roughly 2%. As file sizes and storage capacities expanded, so did the difference between the two types of measurements — an exbibyte is more than 15% larger than a exabyte. Using different terms to refer to binary and decimal measurements helps to address the confusion.

NOTE: For a list of other units of measurement, view this Help Center article.