Data Management Glossary
Petabyte
What is a petabyte?
A petabyte (PB) is a unit of data storage that represents 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^15 bytes. It is 1000x larger than a terabyte (TB) and one million times larger than a gigabyte (GB).
Petabytes are commonly used to describe the capacity of large-scale data storage systems, run by data heavy industries such as those used in scientific research, big data analytics, and cloud computing. For example, a single petabyte could store over 200 million 5 MB photos, or about 13.3 years’ worth of HD video content.
There are 1,000 petabytes (PB) in a zettabyte (ZB). In other words, 1 zettabyte is equal to 1,000,000 petabytes, or 10^21 bytes.
In recent years, with the exponential growth of data generation and the need for high performance, yet cost effective data storage, the term “zettabyte” has become increasingly relevant in discussions around big data and data management. It’s worth noting that even larger units of storage exist, including yottabytes (10^24 bytes) and brontobytes (10^27 bytes), but these are not yet commonly used.
From TechTarget: What is a petabyte?
How big is a petabyte?
According to Teradata, one petabyte is equal to one quadrillion bytes, which is 1 million gigabytes, or 1,000 terabytes. Some estimates hold that a Petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of standard printed text.
Here is a breakdown of the size of a petabyte:
- Bytes: A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes (TB)
- Equivalent Measurements:
- 1 PB = 1,024 TB
- 1 PB = 1,048,576 gigabytes (GB)
- 1 PB = 1,073,741,824 megabytes (MB)
- 1 PB = 1,099,511,627,776 kilobytes (KB)
- 1 PB = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes
Petabyte Comparison Examples
- A typical HD movie is about 4-5 GB in size. A petabyte could store around 200,000 HD movies.
- An average MP3 song is about 5 MB. A petabyte could hold approximately 210 million songs.
- A 1 terabyte hard drive can store around 250,000 photos. A petabyte could hold about 256 million photos.
The bottom line is that a petabyte is an enormous amount of data storage, most of which is unstructured data. This volume of data is typically suitable for large-scale data centers, cloud storage providers, and organizations that handle massive amounts of information. Healthcare organizations, which produce more data than most other sectors, has on average 50PB of data (per hospital).
Petabyte-Scale Unstructured Data Management and Data Migration
At Komprise we talk about petabyte-scale unstructured data management and data migrations. For example, Komprise Analysis analyzes across hundreds of petabytes without impacting performance. Read the press release. Komprise executes petabyte-scale file data migrations across many NAS and cloud storage technologies.
Komprise enterprise customers are distributed across healthcare, life sciences, biotech, media and entertainment, public sector, higher education, financial services, legal, energy, high-tech and other industries managing petabyte-scale unstructured data environments. Learn more about Komprise Intelligent Data Management.
