petabyte
noun/ˈpɛtəbaɪt/
Etymology From peta- + byte.
1
One quadrillion (10¹⁵, or 1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes or 1,000 terabytes.
2
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences Informal A pebibyte.
- As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics.2008 June 23, Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete”, in WIRED, →ISSN, archived from the original on 08 Feb 2016:
- The Hadron Collider has gone from producing 320 terabytes of data a week to a petabyte a second. In short, it has been said that the total amount of data created worldwide in 2011 was about one zetabyte^([sic]) (or 1,000,000 petabytes) and that this figure will increase by 50%–60% in each subsequent year.2017, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Higher Education under Late Capitalism, Springer, →ISBN, page 82:
1 more example
- Instead, Fifield figured out how to “overlap” files inside of a Zip archive, allowing for compression rates far beyond those of a traditional archive—in his most impressive case, he managed to get a 46-megabyte file to compress 4.5 petabytes of data.2019 July 10, Ernie Smith, “The Most Clever ‘Zip Bomb’ Ever Made Explodes a 46MB File to 4.5 Petabytes”, in VICE, archived from the original on 11 Sep 2024:
- Synonyms
- PB
- Derived terms
- multipetabyte