What is a Petabyte?
In the world of ever-growing data capacity, a petabyte represents the frontier just ahead of the terabyte, which itself runs just ahead of the gigabyte. In other words, 1,024 gigabytes is one terabyte, and 1,024 terabytes is one petabyte. To put this in perspective, a petabyte is about one million gigabytes (1,048,576). In the late 1980s, a large hard disk was considered 80 megabytes. Today, that amount of space doesn’t even hold a current Windows operating system without butting up against storage limits. Robust programs, music files, digital versatile discs (DVDs), streaming video and high-resolution graphics have all become memory-hungry beasts devouring real estate bit by byte. It would have been unthinkable in the 1980s that the home computer would one day require tens and even hundreds of gigabytes to store data. Though the petabyte still lies beyond the territory of the terabyte, who can say where the home computer will be in another two decades? It’s a humbling thought that the
In order to understand what a petabyte is, we need to begin at the beginning! As you probably already know, a single byte is one unit of storage, whether on a hard disk, database or what have you. On a basic level, one byte is equivalent to one character. A kilobyte is approximately one thousand bytes (kilo means 1,000). Since computers are binary (base two) systems, we have to use 2 to the power of 10 which is 1,024. So in reality, one kilobyte (KB) is 1,024 bytes. If we use the following chart, we can see how we get to Megabytes (MB), Gigabytes (GB), Terabytes (TB) and finally Petabytes (PB) from a single byte: 1 KB (Kilobyte) = 1,024 bytes or 2^10 1 MB (Megabyte) = 1,024 KB or 2^20 1 GB (Gigabyte) = 1,024 MB or 2^30 1 TB (Terrabyte) = 1,024 GB or 2^40 1 PB (Petabyte) = 1,024 TB or 2^50 Therefore, 1 Petabyte (PB) = 1,024 TB = 1024*1024 GB = 1024*1024*1024 MB = 1024*1024*1024*1024 KB = 1024*1024*1024*1024*1024 bytes = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes or roughly 1,000 trillion bytes!!!
