What is petabyte? - Definition from Whatis.com

A petabyte is a measure of memory or storage capacity and is 2 to the 50th power bytes or, in decimal, approximately a thousand terabytes.

In recently announcing how many Fibre Channel storage arrays they had sold, Sun Microsystems stated that it had shipped an aggregate of two petabytes of storage or the equivalent of 40 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text. IBM says that it has shipped four petabytes of SSA Storage.

Also see petaflop.

Contributor(s): Fred Elliott
This was last updated in June 1997

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