What unit comes next in data storage: MB, GB, TB, or OB?

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3 Answers

Samuel Chiltern Profile
Samuel Chiltern answered
Firstly, I have to say that I don't think there is any such unit as OB, and I can't imagine what it might stand for. So I suspect that this is just a typo.

If this is the case, the correct unit is petabyte (PB), and the unit that comes next will be exabyte (EB).

Orders of Magnitude of Data
Here is a list of data storage units, starting with kilobyte, and going right up to yottabyte:

  • Kilobyte (kB) - this is 1,000 (10^3) bytes, a tiny unit by today's standards
  • Megabyte (MB) - one million (10^6) bytes, or a thousand kilobytes
  • Gigabyte (GB) - this is one billion (10^9) bytes, (known as 1 thousand million bytes in the US)
  • Terabyte (TB) - the size of a large consumer drive, this is a billion (10^12) gigabytes
  • Petabyte (PB) - 10^15 bytes, the largest data clusters currently available are measured in PB
  • Exabyte (EB) - 10^18 bytes, this is an enormous amount of storage
  • Zettabyte (ZB) - 10^21 bytes, the entire content of the World Wide Web is estimated to stand at 500 exabytes, or half a zettabyte
  • Yottabyte (YB) - 10^24 bytes, this is an unprecedented quantity of data, which globally, we are nowhere near to reaching yet
m j Profile
m j answered
Not sure about OB, I understand the sequence to be:

  • MegaByte (10^6)
  • GigaByte (10^9)
  • TeraByte (10^12)
  • PetaBite (10^15)
  • ExaByte (10^18)
  • ZettaByte (10^21)
  • YotaByte (10^24)
Joe Crabtree Profile
Joe Crabtree answered
OB means omnibyte. I am not sure where this comes in the sequence. I've always known it to come after terabyte.

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