pebibytes

A pebibyte is a unit of digital information storage. It is one of the binary prefixes defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). A pebibyte is equal to 2^50 bytes, which is 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. This is often approximated as 1024 tebibytes or 10^15 bytes in decimal systems, though the latter is technically a petabyte.

The pebibyte (PiB) is part of a system of prefixes designed to avoid the ambiguity of terms like kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte, which can sometimes refer to either powers of 1000 or powers of 1024. The prefix "pebi-" comes from the binary digits "bi". It is distinct from the metric prefix "peta-", which denotes 10^15. Therefore, a petabyte (PB) is 10^15 bytes, while a pebibyte (PiB) is 2^50 bytes. This distinction is significant in fields where precise measurements of data storage are critical, such as in supercomputing and large-scale data archiving.

The pebibyte is a very large unit of storage. It is commonly encountered when discussing the storage capacity of large data centers, advanced scientific research projects, or the total storage used by major cloud service providers. For example, a single pebibyte can store approximately 267,000 high-definition movies or 13 billion digital photos. The continued growth in data generation and consumption means that units like the pebibyte and larger ones, such as exbibytes and zibibytes, are becoming increasingly relevant.