Meaning & use
petabyte
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Meaning
nouncountablecomputing
A unit of digital information equal to about one thousand trillion bytes, used for very large amounts of data.
Grammar: Countable: one petabyte, two petabytes. Often written as PB.
Patterns
- a petabyte of data
- measured in petabytes
The company stores over a petabyte of customer data.
Modern hard drives can hold several terabytes, but a petabyte is a thousand times larger.
Scientists analyzed petabytes of climate information.
Word forms
| plural | petabytes |
|---|
Common combinations
- a petabyte of data
- The new system can process a petabyte of data every day.
- petabyte-scale
- They built a petabyte-scale storage solution.
- store petabytes
- Cloud providers store petabytes for their clients.
Synonyms and how they differ
- PB
- The standard abbreviation for petabyte, used in technical writing.
Word family
Commonly confused: petabyte or petabit?
petabyte vs petabit
A petabit is one eighth of a petabyte and is used for network speeds, not storage size.
Practice
The data center stores more than a _____ of information, which is about 1,000 terabytes.
Choose one answer.
A petabyte is about 1,000 terabytes, so it fits the context of a very large amount. A terabyte is only 1,000 gigabytes, much smaller than 1,000 terabytes.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “petabyte”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.