petabytes

Petabyte (PB) is a unit of information storage equal to 10^15 bytes, or one quadrillion bytes. In decimal terms, 1 PB equals 1,000 terabytes, 1,000,000 gigabytes, or about 1,000,000,000 megabytes.

In binary terms, the corresponding unit is the pebibyte (PiB), defined as 2^50 bytes, approximately 1.1258999 × 10^15 bytes. Therefore, 1 PB is about 0.888 PiB, and 1 PiB is about 1.126 PB.

Usage: Petabytes are used to describe storage capacity and data volumes in large-scale computing environments, including data centers, cloud storage services, and scientific research projects. They also appear in aggregated datasets for fields such as genomics, climate modeling, and social media analytics.

Prefixes and clarity: In computing, decimal prefixes (kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, peta-) are commonly used, but can be ambiguous with binary storage. To reduce confusion, IEC prefixes KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, PiB denote powers of two. While the term petabyte remains widespread in marketing and documentation, exact byte counts may vary depending on context.