Dictionary

hellabyte en · NOUN

Etymology

From hella- + byte.

Meanings

1. (informal, nonstandard, rare) 10²⁷ or 2⁹⁰ bytes.
   • 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. 2012, Florida State University College of Law, Florida State University Law Review, volume 39, pages 652–653:
   • 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.” 2014, Joe Arnold, members of the SwiftStack team, OpenStack Swift: Using, Administering, and Developing for Swift Object Storage, O’Reilly Media, published 2015, →ISBN, “Chapter 1: The Evolution of Storage”, “The Growth of Data: Exabytes, Hellabytes, and Beyond”, page 4:
   • > 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. ;^) 2010 October 5, Wanda, “Re: OT - RIP Stephen J Cannell”, in alt.sports.basketball.nba.la-lakers (Usenet), message-ID <NJadnd2ZPr2LtzbRnZ2dnUVZ_vmdnZ2d@earthlink.com>:
   • Now imagine constructing something like that for 100 arguments. Your routine would run into the millions of hellabytes. 2010 July 28, Glenn Knickerbocker, “Re: Avoiding interpret?”, in comp.lang.rexx (Usenet), message-ID <MrGdnVh2XfvTLs3RnZ2dnUVZ_sOdnZ2d@bestweb.net>:
   • 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. 2012, Mark Clark, Star Trek FAQ: Everything Left to Know about the First Voyages of the Starship Enterprise, Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, →ISBN:
   • 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. 2013 October 25, Dominic Basulto, “Welcome to the hellabyte era, as in a helluva lot of data”, in The Washington Post:

Forms

Synonyms

brontobyte · ronnabyte