Term of the Moment
drawing program
Definition: petabyte
One quadrillion bytes. Also PB, Pbyte and P-byte. In 2012, Facebook indicated that it stored 100 petabytes of member data. See Petabyte Age, peta, brontobyte, Hadoop, binary values, petabit and space/time.
Hard to Imagine
But, We're Getting Closer
Twenty-Megabyte Hard Disk on the IBM PC AT
A large datacenter holds petabytes of data in all of its drives combined. However, we have a long way to go for a single storage drive to hold just one petabyte.
Introduced in mid-2025, this 245TB solid state NVMe drive from Kioxia is the largest storage drive on the market. At a physical size of 70x100x15 millimeters, four of these drives hold nearly one petabyte. See NVMe. (Image courtesy of Kioxia America Inc.)
In 1984, people were amazed at how much the hard disk on IBM's personal computer could hold. A single Kioxia drive above has more than 12 billion times as much storage. (Image courtesy of IBM.)