Heard of Gigabytes, Terabytes, and even Petabytes. But wondering what the hell's a Yottabyte? Well, according to Wikipedia, a yottabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one septillion (one long scale quadrillion or 10) bytes (one quadrillion gigabytes). And this is the capacity marker NSA is expecting to reach once its datacenter for storing surveillance data is up in the Utah desert.

As of 2009, no computer has yet achieved one yottabyte of storage. In fact, the combined space of all the computer hard drives in the world does not amount to even one zettabyte.

But as we know America is the land of innovation, so anything is possible.

No word on other details, but it is known that the new datacenter will monitor 24x7 activities of US citizens, and will handle 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data.

[via UberGizmo]