All About 'Petabyte' in Simple Words

A petabyte is 2 to the 50th power, or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. However, petabytes are often estimated as 10 to the 15th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. To avoid ambiguity, the exact calculation is often referred to as a pebibyte instead of a petabyte, though both definitions are commonly accepted.

A petabyte is 1,024 terabytes and precedes the exabyte unit of measurement. Since even the largest hard drives are measured in terabytes, petabytes are only used to measure the storage space of multiple hard drives or other collections of data. And no, "petabyte" is not what you do to make a byte purr.

How Large Is a Petabyte?

That's approximately 58,292 movies, which means an equal number of large pizzas. So one petabyte equals 52 tonnes of pepperoni pizza. Yes, my head has assploded. For other equivalents, click and zoom in.
How big are 20 million four-drawer cabinets? As big as the Sears Tower? I have a hard time visualizing that. Strangely enough, I don't have any problem visualizing 52 tonnes of pepperoni pizza.