In the past, available storage devices had a limited capacity of less than 3 megabytes (MB), which was insufficient for today’s needs due to limited hard drive space. Currently, users can store large amounts of information on your computers, smartphones, external hard drives or USB drives. These storage media often have capacities in excess of 1000 MB, and if even more capacity is required, an even larger storage unit will be required.
With the increasing digitization of content, technological advances and the rapid expansion of data transmission services, it is only a matter of time before petabytes are used in everyday life. Currently, for most people, the concept of petabytes is still very abstract and meaningless, but in the near future, petabytes will become gigabytes as storage capacity will continue to increase and today’s storage media become they will be obsolete.
Concept of a petabyte in computing, computing and the internet
The petabyte (PB), whose symbol is PB, is a storage unit used exclusively for digital data. The prefix ‘peta’ comes from the Greek word ‘five’. Its main function is to measure data storage capacity and its equivalent is 1024 terabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
The petabyte is commonly used in distributed storage solutions and core business solutions. It is the main unit of information in servers and computer centers. As well as in central devices that They process large amounts of data. It is also used to represent large content streams.
What are petabytes for?
The petabyte is mainly used to represent very large information flows. It stores high-quality data and rich information that can be processed by search engines like Google or transmitted through the networks of major Internet service providers. Furthermore, the petabyte used in the field of telecommunications to keep devices from all over the world connected, which generates a large volume of information. It also works as a storage and memory device in supercomputers.
At the corporate level, the petabyte is used to store information in databases, process product and customer data and store corporate photos and videos. Most common apps like YouTube and Facebook consume a lot of storage space, which can be hard for ordinary internet users to imagine.
What are the characteristics of petabytes?
Its value is 1015 bytes, which is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. In simpler terms, 1 PB equals 1,000 terabytes, 1 million gigabytes, or 1 trillion megabytes. It is a very large storage unit, much larger than the gigabyte or terabyte.
However, the petabyte has a smaller storage capacity compared to units like the exabyte, zettabyte, or yottabyte. Despite this, it is still a very large storage unit and is widely used in a variety of fields. These include the storage of large amounts of data and the transmission of information over the network.
How much is a petabyte?
The Petabyte, which is represented by the symbol PB, equals 10¹⁵ bytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. It can also be expressed as:
- 1,024 terabytes.
- 1,048,576 gigabytes.
- 1,073’741,824 megabytes.
- 1,099,511,627,776 kilobytes.
- 1,125’899,906’842,624 bytes.
- 9,007’199,254’740,992 bits.
To get an idea of its capacity, it can be said that it is equivalent to about 100 hard drives of that capacity. Other ways of understanding its magnitude in computational terms include that equivalent to 40% of the memory capacity of the human brain. This is more than four thousand photos of our lives or more than 1 Quadrillion bytes.
How much does a petabyte weigh?
The Petabyte has a much larger capacity than other storage drives, which means that a 2.5-inch solid state drive (SSD) can hold about 15TB, so it would take about 68 SSDs to store 1 PB of data. Currently, the cost and size of storing a PB is much more reasonable. For example, using 5,000 Western Digital 2-terabyte hard drives, the cost would be around $125,000 and the weight would be around 365 kg.
How much does a petabyte represent?
The petabyte is a unit of memory capacity that represents 1024 terabytes or 2 to the equivalent of 50 bytes. The variety of information units is not 1000, but 1024 because they are binary units instead of decimal. The Petabyte is capable of storing a large amount of information, which is equivalent to more than one million gigabytes (GB). To put it in perspective, a Petabyte can hold about 13.3 years of HD video.
What can be stored in a petabyte?
His storage capacity is very large and larger, and can be used to store different types of data. Here are some examples:
- You can store up to 65536 movies in 4K technologyeach with a capacity of approximately 16 GB.
- You can also store up to 34952 video games with an average capacity of 30 GB.
- stores approximately 6.7 million music discs in MP3 format.
- You can store up to 500 billion pages of text content and images.
- With 20 PB you could store all data processed by Google in 2008, including all data transferred through its servers.
- In addition, in 1 PB you can store about 52428.8 Windows 10 installations.
Examples of using petabyte in programming
petabytes have become increasingly common due to the digitization of content and technological advances in data storage. Here are some examples:
- Before closing, Megaupload had accumulated 25 petabytes of files.
- In 2007, YouTube handled a traffic of 27 petabytes of data.
- Internet Archive is about 70 petabytes of stored data.
- Google processes around 20 petabytes of data daily, including images, information and videos.
- a person could recording his life on high-quality video for over 60 years with a petabyte of storage.
- Facebook can generate more than 60,000 million images, which is equivalent to 1.5 petabytes of data.
- The reports of data traffic in the area of telecommunications also use petabytesas in the case of AT&T, which transfers large amounts of content through its networks.