A petabyte is one million gigabytes and stores single bits. The amount of data needed has increased due to music files, streaming video, and high-resolution graphics. The petabyte is currently only used in university-owned supercomputers.
In the world of ever-growing data capacity, a petabyte represents the frontier just ahead of the terabyte, which in turn 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 into perspective, a petabyte is approximately one million gigabytes (1,048,576).
In the late 1980s, a large hard drive was considered 80 megabytes. Today, that amount of space doesn’t even hold a current Windows operating system without facing storage limits. Robust programs, music files, digital versatile discs (DVDs), streaming video, and high-resolution graphics have all become memory-hungry beasts that gobble up real estate bit by bit. It would have been unthinkable in the 1980s that your home computer would one day require tens and even hundreds of gigabytes to store data. While the petabyte is still beyond terabyte territory, who’s to say where the home computer will be in another two decades?
It’s a humbling thought that the mighty petabyte stores single bits. It takes eight bits to make a byte, which represents a single character. The word “bit,” for example, requires 24 bits to spell, or three bytes.
Put 1,024 bytes together and you have a kilobyte. Take the same amount of kilobytes (1.024) and you’ve built one megabyte; 1.024 megabytes and you have a gigabyte – and so on to get a terabyte and finally a petabyte. So how many bits are in a petabyte? An incredible 9,007,199,254,740,990!
For the average person, calculating numbers gets a little tricky as you move into petabyte territory, but it doesn’t stop there. Beyond the petabyte are exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes. While some may still be used to the idea that 1,024 megabytes equals one gigabyte, we’re quickly getting to the point where people will refer to having “half a terabyte” of storage, rather than 500 gigabytes. For now, however, the petabyte is quietly relegated to university-owned supercomputers like those at Indiana University, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and IBM’s global services, among others. We can only hope that by the time the home user buys storage capacity by the petabyte, defragmentation programs have kept pace.
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