Each zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes. One exabyte = 1,000 petabytes. One petabyte = 1,000 terabytes. One terabyte (you may be starting to feel comfortable now) is 1,000 gigabytes. And, of course, one gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. So, a zettabyte is 1 thousand, million terabytes.
As of 2011, no storage system has achieved one zettabyte of information. The combined space of all computer hard drives in the world was estimated at approximately 160 exabytes in 2006.[5] This has increased rapidly however, as during the 2011 Fiscal Year, Seagate reported selling a combined total of 330 exabytes of hard drives. This does not include shipments from any other manufacturer, and only includes those sold during 2011. [6] As of 2009, the entire Internet was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes.
Using a 1 inch square piece of Aluminum metal that is 0.2 inch high, 17 Zettabytes of information or computer storage can be stored, retrieved and erased. This is the ultimate flash drive.
This technology uses the regular crystal pattern of grains in Aluminum to store data. Each grain is equivalent to a block of storage in Flash memory MLC NAND. These Aluminum grain blocks can store 256 pages of 4,096 bytes each.
In this small piece of Aluminum metal, there are approximately 22, 450 fine grains in one layer and approximately 1,024 layers that are writable or approximately 23 million grain/blocks and 5.89 x 109 pages of 4,096 bytes or storage for 24,105,503,948,800 bytes or 24 Terabytes of binary 1s and 0s storage.
So how do we get from 24 Terabytes to 17 Zettabytes? Each of the Aluminum Grain/Blocks can be treated as a logical sphere and data can be stored on the surface of the sphere in lines of longitude and latitude using 0-359 for each degree. Each degree can be sub-divided into 1,000 discrete storage locations for a byte. Doing the math (360x1000x2=720,000) and multiplying the 24 Terabyte figure above equals 1.7355962843136e+19 or 17 Exabytes. Now, build 1,000 spheres as shells around the original sphere; that is 17 Zettabytes.
This is storing data at the crystal-molecular level and the amount of information that can be written, retrieved, over-written and erased scales upward with bigger pieces of Aluminum metal. This storage of data is non-volatile and has rapid access times. With the use of the flow of data around wire, described elsewhere on this site, the flow of data to aluminum drives can be measured in bus speeds at the speed of Light.
Hey, you Quantum Computer geeks, don’t you realize that this is a Qubit storage device?