Petabyte (PB)
Modern equivalent
1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = 1,000 terabytes
One quadrillion bytes, being a thousand terabytes, and the working unit of large-scale data storage.
The petabyte is where storage stops being a consumer concern. The Large Hadron Collider generates tens of petabytes of data each year after filtering, having discarded the overwhelming majority of what its detectors actually record. A petabyte would hold roughly five hundred billion pages of plain text, or about twenty thousand years of continuous audio. The prefix comes from the Greek for five, marking the fifth power of a thousand, as tera marks the fourth and giga the third.