Hard drive sizes

When I was young, a 40 MB hard drive was decent sized. The last five or ten years have seen gigabyte drives. Now Best Buy is selling 1 Terabyte hard drives for around $90.

So...if hard drives keep getting bigger and bigger, what will we call them? How will they be measured? A bit of research helped create the following chart:

 

bit
It's the smallest piece of information possible - either a 0 or a 1
 
byte
A byte is 8 bits. You need a byte to represent letters and numbers.
To a computer, the letter 'g' is 01100111
 
kilobyte
a kilobyte (kB) is 1024 bytes. A typewritten page equals about 2kB
The 5 1⁄4 inch floppy drives from the late 1970s could hold 360 kB
 
megabyte
1 MB=1024 kB
One thick book has about a megabyte of information.
The IBM PC/XT in 1983 included a 10MB hard drive
 
gigabyte
1 GB=1024 MB
One gigabyte is more than 8 billion bits.
One average library floor contains about 50 GB of books on shelves.
 
terabyte
1 TB=1024 GB
In 2012, you can buy a 1 TB hard drive from Best Buy for around $90
A drive this size can hold about a million thick books (=50,000 trees)
 
petabyte
1 PB=1024 TB
200 Petabytes=all the printed materials in the world
Google processes about 24 petabytes of data per day.
 
exabyte
1 EB=1024 PB
All the words ever spoken by human beings = 5 exabytes.
Monthly information passing through the internet is measured in exabytes.
 
zettabyte
1 ZB=1024 EB
The entire Internet in 2012 is estimated to contain approx. 1 ZB.
1 ZB = 50,000 years’ worth of DVD-quality video
 
yottabyte
1 YB=1024 ZB
Nearly 10 septillion bits. This is way more space than we need. For now.
Most references seem to list Yottabyte as the highest named measurement.
 
Brontobyte and Geopbyte A search of the internet reveals that the next steps up are Brontobyte and Geopbyte - however, I am uncertain whether or not these are even scientifically accepted terms. The best references to them seem to be the same cut-and-paste text floating between Urban Dictionary and Yahoo Answers.

I will update if I find better information on the upper limits.