Pebibyte

What does Pebibyte mean?

A pebibyte (PiB) is a unit of digital information or computer Storage capacity. It is equal to 2^50 bytes, or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. The prefix “pebi” is derived from the binary prefix “pebi” (Pi), which means 2^50.

In comparison to other units of storage capacity, a pebibyte is larger than a terabyte (TB), which is equal to 2^40 bytes, and smaller than an exabyte (EiB), which is equal to 2^60 bytes.

Applications

Pebibytes are used to measure the storage capacity of large Data sets, such as those found in:

• Big Data Analytics
• Cloud computing
• High-performance computing
• Scientific research
• Video and audio archives
• Medical imaging
• Genomics

The increasing availability of affordable high-capacity storage devices, such as Hard Disk drives (HDDs) and solid-State drives (SSDs), has made pebibytes a more common unit of measurement in these applications.

History

The term “pebibyte” was first proposed in 1998 by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as part of the IEC 60027-2 standard, which defines prefixes for binary multiples. The prefix “pebi” was chosen to be consistent with the existing prefixes for binary multiples, such as “kilo” (Ki), “mega” (Mi), “giga” (Gi), and “tera” (Ti).

In 2008, the International System of Units (SI) adopted the prefixes “pebi” (Pi) and “exbi” (Ei) for binary multiples of 2^50 and 2^60, respectively. This standardization ensured that the pebibyte would be recognized as a standard unit of storage capacity in both the scientific and technological communities.