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"Ten Petabytes (10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of cultural material saved!" Not quite 10 petabytes: (10 * 1024^5) > 10^16 edit: this is wrong, silly me.

• anonymouz 14y ago
  I think by now we have more or less standarized on 10^15 as a Petabyte, as this is consistent with the SI system. For the powers-of-2 based approach, the -bi- prefixes are now well established. So: 1 Petabyte = 10^15 Bytes 1 Pebibyte = 1024^5 Bytes = 2^50 Bytes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte . This way we no longer need to abuse/redefine the SI prefixes! edit: definition of Petabyte corrected from 10^16
  • arasmussen 14y ago
    Oh interesting, thanks for that tidbit of knowledge! I always thought they all (mega, tera, giga, etc) went off the powers-of-2 system. Also, you have a typo, 1 Petabyte = 10^15 bytes I believe.
    • anonymouz 14y ago
      > Also, you have a typo, 1 Petabyte = 10^15 bytes I believe. Thanks! The power-of-2 system was quite popular for a long time when applied to computers, but always clashed with the much older (and well thought out) SI system where everything is defined in powers of 10, and that is used everywhere else (think physics,...). I think harddrive companies where the first to switch their definitions to the decimal based system (for the obvious reason that their disks would then seem bigger to people accustomed to the common power of 2 system...). A decade or so ago the kibi, mebi, ... prefixes where introduced, and at some point people more or less switched to those. There seems to be an even more detailed article about this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix .
• Aardwolf 14y ago
  Ten petabytes is 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Ten pebibytes is 11,258,999,068,426,240 bytes. So the article is correct.