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petabyte

American  
[pet-uh-bahyt] / ˈpɛt əˌbaɪt /

noun

  1. 2 50 bytes, or 1,024 terabytes.

  2. (loosely) 10 15 or a million billion bytes. PB


petabyte British  
/ ˈpɛtəˌbaɪt /

noun

  1. computing 10 15 or 2 50 bytes

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

petabyte Scientific  
/ pĕtə-bīt /
  1. A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 terabytes (2 50 bytes).

  2. One quadrillion bytes.

  3. See Note at megabyte


Etymology

Origin of petabyte

peta- + byte

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

Together, these archives now hold about 100 petabytes of information -- roughly equivalent to the total amount of text found across the entire internet, with a single petabyte equaling one million gigabytes.

From Science Daily Oct. 28, 2025

Every time one tiny subatomic particle smashes into another during experiments at the LHC, the impact generates staggering volumes of data – about one petabyte per second.

From BBC Jul. 1, 2024

Cheng says the hardest part was finding computational resources large enough to handle the petabyte of data.

From Science Magazine Jun. 16, 2024

A petabyte, by the way, is 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes.

From Seattle Times Jun. 25, 2022

One petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes.

From New York Times Mar. 2, 2010

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