Petabyte

Petabyte

Petabyte: a unit of data measurement equal to 〖10〗^15 bytes

Petabyte is the metric equivalent of the Pebibyte, using the power of ten instead of two,〖10〗^15 to be specific.

Because of this it totals 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes instead of the metric amount.

It is defined not by the IEC standards associated with binary measurement, but with the SI metric standards and is denoted by the symbol PB.

Like the Pebibyte, it is the fifth multiple in the series, but in this case it is a multiple of 1000 instead of 1024, making it about 12.5% smaller than the Pebibyte.

This means when looking at the basic formula for each- 1000 for Peta and 1024 for Pebi- the conversion can be seen as PiB= 1.125 PB.

It comes after the Terabyte, but before the Exabyte. There are large storage clouds measured in Petabytes, and parts of annual internet traffic can be measured in it, but those are moving more towards Exabytes.

A simple way of looking at it is that the base for both is the bit, followed by the byte which is 8 times the size of the bit.

After that, each metric measurement is 1000 times the previous term, and each binary unit is 1024 times the size of the previous unit.

Note that the Petabyte is on the metric scale, which is an SI standard of measurement. Like other measuring units, it has a binary counterpart, which measures on the binary scale of powers of two, instead of the metric scale using multiples of ten. This binary counterpart is the Pebibyte.

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