Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 terabytes (250 bytes).
  • noun One quadrillion bytes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun SI One quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes. SI symbol: PB.
  • noun computing 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes or 10245, or 250. This capacity may be expressed unambiguously as a pebibyte. SI symbol: PiB, computing symbol: PB.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a unit of information equal to 1000 terabytes or 10^15 bytes
  • noun a unit of information equal to 1024 tebibytes or 2^50 bytes

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From peta- +‎ byte.

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Examples

  • The Internet Archive has just installed its first Petabox, "a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes)."

    Boing Boing: May 9, 2004 - May 15, 2004 Archives 2004

  • Do the math and you will see (a petabyte is 1024 terabytes a terabyte is 1020 gigabytes and so on) in order to just get 1 petabyte the hub would need 1024 users sharing a terabyte) I think anyone familiar with shares knows how unlikely this scenario is.

    To MPAA / RIAA - 2004

  • (A petabyte is the equivalent of a stack of DVDs stretching from here to the moon.)

    GigaOM Network 2010

  • A petabyte is the equivalent of 223,101 DVDs, or over

    Planet Sun 2008

  • A petabyte is the equivalent of 223,101 DVDs, or over

    Sun Bloggers 2008

  • (For those of us who can't inherently imagine the vastness of a petabyte, IBM noted that a petabyte is the equivalent of

    InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs 2010

  • (For those of us who can't inherently imagine the vastness of a petabyte, IBM noted that a petabyte is the equivalent of

    InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs 2010

  • (For those of us who can't inherently imagine the vastness of a petabyte, IBM noted that a petabyte is the equivalent of

    InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs 2010

  • (For those of us who can't inherently imagine the vastness of a petabyte, IBM noted that a petabyte is the equivalent of

    InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs 2010

  • (For those of us who can't inherently imagine the vastness of a petabyte, IBM noted that a petabyte is the equivalent of

    InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs 2010

Comments

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  • Like, way really a lot of data.

    A petabyte is 2 to the 50th power, or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes.

    Woah.

    July 24, 2008

  • Is that totally vegetarian? 'Cause I'm on a new diet. I only hork up vegies now.

    July 24, 2008

  • Try soyabyte, a new measurement of vegan to the power of meat substitute. Divided by cabbage, which is a kind of lowest common demonimator.

    July 24, 2008

  • A petabyte is 10^15 bytes. The binary approximation of 2^50 bytes has its own name since 1998, the pebibyte.

    September 10, 2008