Which is bigger - a petabyte or zottabyte?

Terabytes? Petabytes? Yottabytes?  What do those words mean? How do they compare? There are so many terms to remember in the field of technology that it is hard to keep them all straight!  

I'll give you a tip, though. When asked the questions below, your correct answer will probably be  _______ GB (gigabytes).
"How large is your cellphone?"
"How large is your computer's hard drive?"
"How much cellular data do you have on your phone?"

The chart below might be helpful, too.  To move up each level from the bottom to the top, multiply by 1000 (or 1024 to be exact)!

• A yottabyte (YB) is larger than a 
• zettabyte (ZB) is larger than an .... 
• exabyte (EB) is larger than a...
• petabyte (PB), which is larger than a...
• terabyte (TB), which is larger than a...
• gigabyte (GB), which is larger than a...
• megabyte (MB), which is larger than a...
• kilobyte (KB), which is larger than a...
• byte (B)

--and it takes 8 bits to make one byte.  A bit is the amount of storage required to store one character of text. 

I smile when I think about when I first started teaching in the computer lab at the middle school; the hard drives in the computer lab were measured in megabytes (MB) and we thought that was wonderful!

Times have changed.  Some day yottabyte will be part of our every day language, I suppose.