Petabyte Age

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What Does Petabyte Age Mean?

Petabyte Age refers to a futuristic age where the measurement of digital storage is available in petabytes (PB), each of which is equal to 1,024 terabytes (TB). Many experts consider that during the age of the PB, scientific researchers will refrain from creating hypotheses or models and theory testing. Rather, advanced data mining will be used with PBs of data, available for reference.

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All facets of computing, such as instant messaging, personal data, blogs, social networking and other documents, demand storage, either on a personal computer or general servers with huge storage capacity. As the volume of available data increases, requirements for storage, as well as how data is measured, will increase.

Techopedia Explains Petabyte Age

As of 2012, gigabyte (GB) is the most common storage unit, with expected domination by the TB in the near future. The PB unit is expected to take over the number one position within a few years, opening the door to the Petabyte Age.

Data mining over PBs of data will allow an infinite inflow of knowledge. For example, the this data mining capacity could mean checking international news items to identify troublespots and locations, as well as trends and concerns of high significance or severity – without needing to recognize their root causes. This kind of geotagging has already begun in the form of projects like Europe Media Monitor (EMM) and Google Zeitgeist. As a result, it is predicted that in the Petabyte Age, existing scientific strategies for hypothesizing, modeling and testing data will be substituted with huge data volume. Inferences from huge volumes of data compiled from around the globe would require no data modeling, as the numbers would undoubtedly speak for themselves.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.