Petabytes to Kilobytes (PB to kB)
1 petabyte equals 1,000,000,000,000 kilobytes exactly.
How to convert petabytes to kilobytes
To convert petabytes to kilobytes, multiply the number of petabytes by 1,000,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilobytes by 1×10⁻¹².
kilobytes = petabytes × 1,000,000,000,000
Example: 10 petabytes = 10,000,000,000,000 kilobytes.
Decimal prefixes (kB, MB, GB) are powers of 1,000; binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB) are powers of 1,024. Storage makers use decimal; Windows reports binary but labels it GB.
About these units
Petabyte (PB)
1,000 terabytes (10¹⁵ bytes). The scale of large data centers.
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.
1 petabyte = 1×10¹⁵ bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Petabyte; BIPM: SI prefixes; Wikipedia: Binary prefix
Kilobyte (kB)
1,000 bytes in the SI (decimal) definition. Older software and Windows sometimes use KB to mean 1,024 bytes; see kibibyte.
Few units have had two meanings for so long. By the mid-1960s most computers used binary addressing, so memory sizes came in powers of two and engineers borrowed kilo to mean 1,024. IBM documentation for the System/360 in 1964 used an uppercase K for 1,024. Hard disk makers took a different path from the start. The IEC later settled the question: kilobyte, symbol kB, means 1,000 bytes, and 1,024 bytes is a kibibyte.
Floppy disks show the muddle. The Shugart SA-400 of 1976 held 109,375 bytes unformatted and was advertised as 110 Kbyte, the decimal way, while a 1978 Tandon double-density disk held 368,640 bytes, or 360 times 1,024, and was sold as 360 KB. Windows still divides by 1,024, so a 65,536-byte file appears as 64 KB there, while Mac OS X Snow Leopard and later would call it 66 kB. A kilobyte is also tiny: Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado is 12,843 bytes.
1 kilobyte = 1,000 bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Kilobyte; Wikipedia: Binary prefix; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples
Related conversions
- Kilobytes to petabytes (reverse)
- Petabytes to bytes
- Petabytes to megabytes
- Petabytes to gigabytes
- Petabytes to terabytes
- Petabytes to bits
- Petabytes to kibibytes
- Petabytes to mebibytes
- Petabytes to gibibytes
- Petabytes to tebibytes
- Petabytes to kilobits
- Petabytes to megabits
- Petabytes to gigabits
- Bytes to kilobytes
- Megabytes to kilobytes
- Gigabytes to kilobytes
- Terabytes to kilobytes
- Bits to kilobytes
- Kibibytes to kilobytes
- Mebibytes to kilobytes
- Gibibytes to kilobytes
- Tebibytes to kilobytes
- Kilobits to kilobytes
- Megabits to kilobytes
- Gigabits to kilobytes
See all digital storage units.