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.

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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).
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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…