Orders of magnitude (data)

Orders of magnitude
area
currency
data
density
energy
length
mass
numbers
power
specific heat capacity
speed
temperature
time
volume
Conversion of units
physical unit
SI
SI base unit
SI derived unit
SI prefix
Planck units

This is a list of orders of magnitude for data (or information), measured in bits. This article assumes a formal attitude towards terminology. That means two things:

1. A group of 8 bits in a computer is called an octet. A byte is the same for most practical purposes, but does not equal 8 bits on all computer architectures.
2. The decimal prefixes kilo, mega etc. are strictly powers of 10. The powers of 2 are the binary prefixes kibi, mebi etc.

Accordingly, 8192 bits of data are a kibioctet and 8000 bits are a kilooctet.

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Contents

1 1 bit 2 10 bits 3 102 bits 4 103 bits – One kilobit 5 104 bits 6 105 bits 7 106 bits – One megabit 8 107 bits 9 108 bits 10 109 bits – One gigabit 11 1010 bits 12 1011 bits 13 1012 bits – One terabit 14 1013 bits 15 1015 bits – One petabit 16 1016 bits 17 1017 bits 18 1018 bits – One exabit 19 1019 bits 20 1020 bits 21 1021 bits – One zettabit 22 1022 bits

1 bit

• 1 bit – True or false
• 1.5 bit – Average information entropy per character in English text.
• 4 bits – A semioctet or nibble. The size of a hexadecimal digit.
• 5 bits – Size of code points in the Baudot code, used in telex communication.
• 6 bits – Size of code points in the Braille code, a tactile writing system for the blind.
• 7 bits – Size of code points in the ASCII character set.
• 8 bits – An octet. Equivalent to a byte on many computer architectures.

10 bits

• 16 bits – In many programming languages, the size of an integer capable of holding 65,536 different values.
• 32 bits – Size of an integer capable of holding 4,294,967,296 different values.
• 32 bits – Size of an IEEE 754 single-precision floating point number.
• 32 bits – Size of addresses in IPv4, the current Internet protocol.
• 56 bits – Cipher strength of the DES encryption standard.
• 64 bits – Size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values.
• 64 bits – Size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number.

10² bits

• 128 bits – Size of addresses in IPv6, the coming Internet protocol.
• 128 bits – Minimum cipher strength of the Rijndael and AES encryption standards.

10³ bits – One kilobit

• 1,024 bits (2¹⁰ bits) – One kibibit.
• 8,000 bits (10³ octets) – One kilooctet.
• 8,192 bits (2¹³ bits, 2¹⁰ octets) – One kibioctet.

10⁴ bits

• 22,500 bits – Amount of information in a typical non-fiction book.
• 27,000 bits – Amount of information in a typical phone book.
• 42,000 bits – Amount of information in a typical reference book.

10⁵ bits

10⁶ bits – One megabit

• 1,048,576 bits (2²⁰ bits) – One mebibit.
• 8,000,000 bits (10⁶ octets) – One megaoctet.
• 8 Mbits – Typical computer screen capacity.
• 8,388,608 bits (2²³ bits, 2²⁰ octets) – One mebioctet.

10⁷ bits

• 11,796,480 bits – Capacity of a 3.5" floppy disk, colloquially known as 1.44 megabyte but actually 1.44 × 1000 × 1024 bytes.
• 25 Mbits – Amount of data in a typical color slide.
• 25,964,951 bits – Size of the largest known Mersenne prime. All 25,964,951 bits are 1.

10⁸ bits

• 150 Mbits – Amount of data in a large foldout map.

10⁹ bits – One gigabit

• 1,073,741,824 bits (2³⁰ bits) – One gibibit.
• 8,000,000,000 bits (10⁹ octets) – One gigaoctet.
• 5.45 × 10⁹ bits (650 mebioctets) – Capacity of a regular compact disc.
• 6.4 × 10⁹ bits – Size of the human genome, 3.2 billion base pairs.
• 8,589,934,592 bits (2³³ bits, 2³⁰ octets) – One gibioctet.

10¹⁰ bits

10¹¹ bits

• 1.46 × 10¹¹ bits (17 gibioctets) – Capacity of a double-sided, dual-layered DVD.
• (approximately) 4.12 × 10¹² bits (515 gibioctets) – As of 2002, data of pi to the largest number of digits ever calculated (1.24 trillion).

10¹² bits – One terabit

• 10¹² bits (100 gigaoctets) – Approximate size of all Wikimedia projects.
• 1.6 × 10¹² bits (200 gigaoctets) – Capacity of a hard disk that would be considered moderately large in 2004.

10¹³ bits

• 10¹⁴ bits
• 1.5 × 10¹⁴ bits (18.75 teraoctets) – Amount of information in the Library of Congress, if it were all digitized.

10¹⁵ bits – One petabit

• 2.4 × 10¹⁵ bits (300 teraoctets) – Size of the Internet Archive in 2004.

10¹⁶ bits

• 4.5 × 10¹⁶ bits (5.625 petaoctets) – Estimated hard drive space in Google's server farm in 2004.

10¹⁷ bits

10¹⁸ bits – One exabit

• 1.6 × 10¹⁸ bits (200 petaoctets) – Total amoount of printed material in the world.

10¹⁹ bits

10²⁰ bits

10²¹ bits – One zettabit

10²² bits

• 1.8 × 10²² bits (2.25 zettaoctets)– amount of information which can be stored in 1 gram of DNA