Print PageBelow is a table of units of Big Data. Terms and amounts of data are given along with examples of what that amount of data may be for reference. Symbols in the table are SI units, but you may see different symbols in common usage for some of these units.
| Name | Symbol | Quantity | Approximate Equivalents |
| byte | B | 10000 B = 1 B | A single character such as “q” or “3” |
| kilobyte | KB | 10001 B = 1000 B | 1000 letters – about 125 words |
| megabyte | MB | 10002 B = 1000 KB | A novel – about 125,000 words or one color image |
| gigabyte | GB | 10003 B = 1000 MB | Amount of memory in smart phone or computer – about 1000 novels -about 10 years of constant reading |
| terabyte | TB | 10004 B = 1000 GB | A huge library of books – about 100,000 volumes |
| petabyte | PB | 10005 B = 1000 TB | All the books ever published |
| exabyte | EB | 10006 B = 1000 PB | Number of stars in the galaxy |
| zettabyte | ZB | 10007 B = 1000 EB | The entire contents of the Internet in 2016 |
You can see that each of these names is for a quantity 1000 times bigger than the previous name. In terms of data storage, the first computer floppy disks held a few hundred KB, early hard drives had tens of MB capacity, and in 2017, flash drives (thumb drives) held 250 GB of data.
Looking at this table, you can see that the 100 TB of data generated each day by FaceBook users is truly Big Data, but still is only about a billionth of the entire Internet.