Hellabyte

Now imagine constructing something like that for 100 arguments. Your routine would run into the millions of hellabytes.

> I have a few episodes on one of my hard drives...downloading some more / > now...[…]I've had this very intention ever since the news of Cannell's death reminded me of how much I loved TRF [The Rockford Files]. Picked up another hard drive with hellabyte capacity. ;^)

At these rates of growth, within the next decade or two, the human race could well be sitting on top of more than 1 × 10²⁷ bytes of data—that’s a whole hellabyte.

Star Trek showed us a world where doors slid open as we approached, where we had small flip-open communicators that let us talk to anyone in the world, where we had wall-size screens and video communication, silver discs that stored hellabytes of data, universal translators, medical beds, desktop computers, tablets that gave us instant access to information, supercomputers that understood speech, and a lot of other technologies we’re still designing and building.

We are running out of words to describe how much data we have.[…]MIT’s Andrew McAfee and others have actually proposed that we settle on “hellabyte” – as in, “helluva lot of data,” to describe the next stage of the data deluge.

Beyond an exabyte (10¹⁸ bytes), we have the zettabyte (10²¹ bytes) and yottabyte (10²⁴ bytes), which follow the prefixes offered by the International System of Units (SI). In response both to the rapid growth of data and the proliferation of terms, some have suggested that we simply use “hellabyte,” for “hell of a lot of bytes.”