Data Volume Units

CYGNSS satellite

Data Volumes:

The volume of data in a single file or file system can be described by a unit called a byte. However, data volumes can become very large when dealing with Earth satellite data. Below is a table to explain data volume units (Credit:  Roy Williams, Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Insittute of Technology).

  • Kilo- means 1,000; a Kilobyte is one thousand bytes.
  • Mega- means 1,000,000; a Megabyte is a million bytes.
  • Giga- means 1,000,000,000; a Gigabyte is a billion bytes.
  • Tera- means 1,000,000,000,000; a Terabyte is a trillion bytes.
  • Peta- means 1,000,000,000,000,000; a Petabyte is 1,000 Terabytes.
  • Exa- means 1,000,000,000,000,000,000; an Exabyte is 1,000 Petabytes.
  • Zetta- means 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000; a Zettabyte is 1,000 Exabytes.
  • Yotta- means 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000; a Yottabyte is 1,000 Zettabytes.

Examples of Data Volumes:

data volume

 

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