petabyte

noun

Etymology: Etymology tree English peta- Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyd- Proto-Indo-European *bʰéydt Proto-Germanic *bītaną Proto-West Germanic *bītan Old English bītan Middle English biten English bite English byte English petabyte From peta- + byte.

1. One quadrillion (10¹⁵, or 1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes or 1,000 terabytes.
2. A pebibyte.

   “As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics.”

   “The Hadron Collider has gone from producing 320 terabytes of data a week to a petabyte a second. In short, it has been said that the total amount of data created worldwide in 2011 was about one zetabyte^([sic]) (or 1,000,000 petabytes) and that this figure will increase by 50%–60% in each subsequent year.”