The petabyte is a multiple of the byte.
A petabyte is a multiple of a byte that is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (that is, ten to the power of fifteen bytes ). This is a unit larger than the gigabyte or terabyte , but smaller than units such as the exabyte , zettabyte , or yottabyte .
It should be noted that the byte is part of the so-called information units . It is equivalent to eight bits and allows, through its multiples, to refer to various storage measures.
By decomposing this unit of information, we discover that those to which we are accustomed at the present seem insignificant: the petabyte is made up of 1,024 terabytes , which, in turn, is equivalent to 1,024 gigabytes and this must continue until reaching the byte, passing through the megabyte and the kilobyte. It is important to note that, although the kilo prefix is the same one used to represent decimal units (such as the kilometer ), the multiple of the information units is not 1000, but 1024 , since they are not decimal, but binary.
The petabyte in everyday language
The use of each unit of information depends on the context. For example, when the amount of information in a given system is so large that it is impracticable to quantify it through units such as bytes or kilobytes, petabytes are usually used, something that is impractical when it comes to mentioning the weight of digital files. contained on a computer for personal use.
Petabytes, therefore, are used to refer to very large amounts of information. The traffic of the most popular websites in the world, the data processed by search engines such as Google or the transfers that take place on the networks of the main Internet providers can be estimated in petabytes since they represent very high figures. If someone wanted to name the data that Google processes in a month using kilobyte quantities, for example, they would have to use such a large number of zeros that their notation would be very difficult to understand.
Large companies like Facebook or Google handle a volume of information that can be expressed in petabytes.
Other uses of this information unit
Other of the most common uses for the petabyte concept are the following:
- Information traffic reports in the field of telecommunications : let us remember that certain companies keep people from various parts of the world connected through devices that are used for several hours per day, so that the volume of information passed by its networks is too large to be counted using units smaller than the petabyte. So much so that the AT&T company, for example, records an average of 30 petabytes of information exchanged daily.
- Supercomputer storage and memory devices : already in 2012, the North American company Cray Inc. launched the construction of a supercomputer called Blue Waters, which has a storage capacity of 25 petabytes on disk and up to 500 on magnetic tape. Its main memory (what we usually know as RAM) is 1.5 petabytes.
- Databases : far from the volume of records of a family business, multinationals need a colossal infrastructure to store and process the data of all their clients and their products in this era in which all corporate information must exist in digital format. Both the databases for everyday use for the interaction of users with the systems and those intended for the archiving of old information, the volume of data of certain companies can be calculated in several tens of petabytes.
- Storage of images and videos : companies like YouTube and Facebook require storage volumes that are difficult to imagine for their users. In 2013, a decade ago, Facebook recorded the uploading of more than 350 million photographs every day.