petabyte

A petabyte (PB) is a unit of digital information storage equal to 10^15 bytes. It is part of the SI prefix system, where peta denotes 10^15 and the symbol is PB. In contexts that use binary counting, the equivalent is the pebibyte (PiB), which equals 2^50 bytes, about 1.1259×10^15 bytes. Thus, 1 PiB ≈ 1.126 PB, and 1 PB ≈ 0.888 PiB.

Conversions commonly used in practice note that 1 PB equals 1,000 terabytes (TB) or 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB) in decimal terms. In binary terms, 1 PiB equals 1024 tebibytes (TiB) or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, roughly 1.126 PB. The decimal and binary forms are close in magnitude but not identical, which can cause confusion in some contexts.

Usage of petabytes appears in descriptions of very large storage capacities and data volumes. They are typical for large-scale data centers, cloud storage services, and scientific projects that generate and archive substantial datasets. For example, a national research archive or a major photo- and video-collection service may describe its capacity in PB to reflect ongoing growth.

History and context notes: the rise of petabytes corresponds with rapid increases in data generation in the 2000s and 2010s. To reduce ambiguity, many technical environments distinguish decimal PB from binary PiB, though consumer-facing storage measurements often quote decimal values. Related terms include kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, exabyte, and their binary counterparts such as pebibyte, tebibyte, and so on.