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 10¹⁵units. 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 2⁵⁰bytes 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).

Related Reading

Understanding Bits, Bytes and Their Multiples

Margaret Rouse

Technology expert

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.

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