Yottabytes

Here’s a word I found while reading about the NSA (National Security Agency) and its Utah Data Center located in a National Guard base, south of Bluffdale, Utah. A yottabyte equals 500 quintillion pages of text so I figure there will be quite a few yottabytes housed in the 1.5 million square feet of building dedicated to the NSA’s supercomputers. You know the ones that are keeping tabs on all of our cellphone records and digital conversations, allowing U.S. authorities to monitor everything for potential cyber threats. There’s yottabytes of outrage and varying opinions since the NSA leak by the now infamous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, on the NSA and its doings. They’ve been secretly doing a lot, quite a few yottabytes worth, of snooping and according to some infringing on our fourth amendment rights. This has been all over the news, but back to yottabytes…I am wondering what comes after and the answer is… There is no larger official prefix than yottabyte or yobibytes.  Several unofficial larger numbers have been suggested, such as the brontobyte but the most likely pattern follows the Greek alphabet backwards, beginning with xonabytes and xobibytes. A popular alternative gaining support has been hellabytes. Given the current growth of computer data, the terms beyond yottabyte may become necessary as early as the year 2020, this according to wiki.answers.com (what else!). I for one am voting for hellabytes and I’ll use it in a sentence here. “That’s a hellabytes more than the yottabytes we have in the NSA Data Center!”