Every photo shared and video streamed contributes to an expanding universe of data, requiring new language to comprehend its scale. As we move beyond familiar terms like gigabytes and terabytes, we encounter units of measurement that reflect the reality of modern data. Understanding these larger units helps appreciate the technological forces shaping our world.
What Is a Petabyte?
A petabyte (PB) is a unit of digital information storage representing one quadrillion bytes, or 10^15 bytes. It is equivalent to 1,000 terabytes (TB) or one million gigabytes (GB). While many are familiar with gigabytes for phone storage or terabytes for hard drives, the petabyte operates on a scale for massive data operations.
A distinction exists between a petabyte and a pebibyte (PiB). A petabyte is based on the decimal system (powers of 10). In contrast, a pebibyte is based on the binary system (powers of 2) and is 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. This binary measurement is often used by operating systems to define storage capacity. In general use, “petabyte” is frequently used for both measurements, but the distinction is important in computing and data storage fields.
Visualizing a Petabyte
A single petabyte could store high-definition (HD) video footage that runs continuously for more than 13 years. In terms of music, a petabyte could hold enough MP3 files to play for over 2,000 years without repeating a single song. This illustrates the volume of media contained within this single unit of data.
The scale is just as impressive when considering still images. A standard smartphone photo is roughly 5 megabytes (MB) in size. A petabyte has the capacity to store over 200 million of these photos.
Another way to conceptualize this scale is to compare digital data to physical text. One estimate suggests a petabyte is equivalent to 500 billion pages of standard printed text. If you were to print this out and place it in four-drawer filing cabinets, you would need approximately 20 million of them to house all the documents.
Who Uses Petabytes?
Managing data on the petabyte scale is a reality for many of the world’s largest organizations. Tech giants like Google and Meta handle petabytes of information daily to support their services. This includes storing user-generated content like photos and videos, and indexing the internet to power search engines.
Cloud computing and entertainment services are also major users. Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure provide the infrastructure for many businesses to store their data. Streaming platforms such as Netflix maintain media libraries, measured in petabytes, to deliver movies and television shows to a global audience.
Scientific research is another domain using petabyte-level data. At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the Large Hadron Collider generates petabytes of data from its particle collision experiments for physicists to analyze. Similarly, fields like genomics and climate science process petabytes of data to sequence DNA and model complex environmental systems.