Convert Megabyte (MB) to Petabyte (10^15 bytes) (PB (10^15)) instantly.
About these units
Megabyte (MB)
A megabyte is traditionally 1,048,576 bytes (2²⁰), though storage manufacturers sometimes use the decimal version of 1,000,000 bytes. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, megabytes represented substantial storage: early PCs had 256 kB or 512 kB of RAM, and hard drives with 10–40 MB were considered spacious. Software developers worked within tight memory budgets, optimizing every byte. Megabytes remain relevant today for file sizes such as images, audio files, small binaries, and executable programs. They mark a transitional era when computing moved from kilobytes to the far larger storage capacities we now expect.
Petabyte (10^15 bytes) (PB (10^15))
A decimal petabyte equals 1 quadrillion bytes, a capacity used in cloud data centers, AI training sets, and global archival projects. Organizations like scientific research institutes, major cloud providers, and financial institutions routinely manage petabyte-scale data, requiring specialized infrastructure, redundancy strategies, and data governance. The shift from terabytes to petabytes marks a tipping point where storage strategy must incorporate distributed systems, advanced compression, and scalable metadata management.