Petabyte (PB)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000 terabytes (10¹⁵ bytes). The scale of large data centers.

1 petabyte = 1×10¹⁵ bytes (exactly).

1 petabyte = 1×10¹⁵ bytes

About the petabyte

Peta entered the SI in 1975, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures approved peta and exa in its Resolution 10. A petabyte is 10 to the fifteenth bytes, or 1,000 terabytes, and the word is formed by attaching that prefix to byte, a term Werner Buchholz coined in June 1956 as a deliberate respelling of bite. The binary counterpart is the pebibyte: the IEC amendment published in January 1999 added pebi and exbi to the earlier binary names.

Decimal units dominate at this size: hard drives, SSDs, optical discs and network contracts all use powers of 1,000, and macOS, iOS, Android and Ubuntu follow suit. As an example of the size, one petabyte is about 2,000 years of MP3-encoded music at roughly one megabyte per minute. Binary use of the P symbol is less common than for smaller prefixes.

Sources: Wikipedia: Petabyte; BIPM: SI prefixes; Wikipedia: Binary prefix

Petabyte conversion chart

1 petabyte expressed in every other digital storage unit:

Unit1 petabyte
Bytes1×10¹⁵
Kilobytes1,000,000,000,000
Megabytes1,000,000,000
Gigabytes1,000,000
Terabytes1,000
Bits8×10¹⁵
Kibibytes976,562,500,000
Mebibytes953,674,316.4
Gibibytes931,322.5746
Tebibytes909.4947018
Kilobits8,000,000,000,000
Megabits8,000,000,000
Gigabits8,000,000
Exabytes0.001
Zettabytes0.000001
Yottabytes1×10⁻⁹
Pebibytes0.8881784197
Exbibytes0.000867361738
Terabits8,000
Kibibits7,812,500,000,000
Mebibits7,629,394,531
Gibibits7,450,580.597
Nibbles2×10¹⁵

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