What is a petabyte?

Canada
July 20, 2009 9:32am CST
oh Don't worry, I know what a petabyte is, hee hee, just trying to catch your eye! Apparently it's a MILLION gigabytes!! I did not realize they had a name for this, just found this out from my online backup website. It is a free website, providing you with online backup space, so that you can access it ANYWHERE, you don't have to worry about buying an external hard drive, which I do anyways, but hey, can't hurt to have EXTRA back-up right? NOW, in order to gain access to this petabyte? You just need to pay 4.95 a month, which is a lot cheaper than paying over 100 bucks for a terabyte(I hope I used the right word, the one for a thousand Gigabytes) OR, just get referrals. It is an interesting system though...if you'd like to sign up, message me, and I can send you the link, with no pressure to sign up under me. Anywho, what other words and terms are there for these cool devices? What would 10,000 GBs be? or a thousand TBs? Or a 100 PBs? (hee hee, reminded me of peanut butter!!)
1 person likes this
3 responses
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
20 Jul 09
Technically it is 1024 terabytes because the units are based on binary progression. However, hard drive manufacturers tend to use 1000 terabytes since it helps to make the storage appear larger. This is one of the reasons that a formatted drive is often much less than the specified size.
1 person likes this
• Canada
20 Jul 09
Yes, I was going to enter the technically correct (Wow, I'm using this term in everyday life now WITH the politically correct term! hee hee)But figured that people on here just may well understand the minus 24 byte portion. And no, using the 1000 insted of 1024 would NOT appear larger, since technically the +24 equals larger, The manufacturers are actually using the "more attractive number" aka rounding off, as we learned in high school comp class, because all of those extra bytes are being used to help control the setup of the operating system itself inside the drive, and THAT'S what we learned in iPod tech support tee hee. But yes, thank you for bringing the technological approach to this discussion! You get best response! Thanks for replying and happy myLotting!
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
20 Jul 09
I suspect that you may have misunderstood my intentions concerning size. If you have a 100 gigabyte drive and count each 1000 megabytes as a gigabyte, then you can claim that it is 102.4 gigabytes. Using this conversion for each stage, which is bytes, kilobytes, megabytes then gigabytes you can create a vast discrepancy.
• Canada
21 Jul 09
No dude, I assure you, I completely understood what you were saying. And you're not making it better. Let's put it this way: I knew what you meant, you just had a typo. As did I, I obviously didn't mean "byte" as in JUST a byte, but more like (insert type)-byte.
@Lakota12 (42600)
• United States
20 Jul 09
I figured out some of the bytes but not all adn cant afford to pay for any so I will just go along iwht what I have
1 person likes this
@Lakota12 (42600)
• United States
21 Jul 09
ok ic wow so glad you had a back up I just hate to loose my pics!
@underdogtoo (9579)
• Philippines
20 Jul 09
That is a lot of bytes. That's a lot of bytes. I do know that half a byte is a nybble which would comprise 4 bits; not that it matters. There was a time when megabytes were cool and gigabytes were the stuff of legend and terabytes were unimaginable.
• Canada
21 Jul 09
Oh yeah! I totally recall the days of the megabyte, and to be amazed by it. I could have a lot of .gif pictures with that! And I totally did. And then that started the "I can find a cuter/grotesque/funnier picture than you can" war of junior high. lol.