Meaning – The term petabyte, refers to the unit of computer storage, which equates to 2^50 bytes. Petabytes are not suited to traditional data backups, which have to scan the entire system every time a data backup or archiving job occurs. Traditional network-attached storage (NAS) is scalable and capable of handling petabytes of data, but it can take too much time and use too many resources when going through the system’s organized storage index.
Comparing memory and not storage, a typical laptop or desktop computer contains 16 GB of random access memory (RAM). A top-end server can contain as much as 6 TB of RAM.
Facebook’s data warehouse stores approximately 10 billion user photos, which adds up to about 1.8 PB of storage space.
Example of usage – “A typical DVD holds 4.7 GB of data. That means a single terabyte of storage could hold 217.8 DVD-quality movies, while a single petabyte of storage could hold 223,101 DVD-quality movies.”
