Petabyte

What Does Petabyte Mean?

A petabyte (PB) is a unit of digital information storage used to denote the size of data. It is equivalent to 1,024 terabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Techopedia Explains Petabyte

The prefix "peta" is part of the International System of Units (SI). It means 10¹⁵ units. Hard disk manufacturers label their products in SI units, which may confuse some people in the IT field. The ISO, IEEE and the IEC all recommend using the unit pebibyte, which signifies 2⁵⁰ bytes and is more accurate for the measure of bytes.

Two interpretations can be made using the two standards:

• Using SI, one petabyte is equivalent to 1,000 terabytes, or 10¹⁵ bytes.
• Using traditional binary measurement, one petabyte is equivalent to 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, that’s 2⁵⁰ bytes, also equivalent to 1 pebibyte (PiB).