Conversion from 50 Megaoctets to Petabits

Information about the Megaoctet (Mo)

The megaoctet is a unit of digital information equal to one million octets, or eight million bits. Its symbol is Mo. It is the unit of the individual file: a photograph, a song, a document, an application download are all sized in megaoctets, which makes it the most frequently read data unit in daily life.

The typical figures are worth carrying in the head. A photograph from a phone is 2 to 5 megaoctets, a raw photograph from a system camera 25 to 50. A compressed song is 3 to 10. A minute of high-definition video is around 100. A long text document is under one. An operating system update is several thousand, which is why it is quoted in gigaoctets instead.

The megaoctet also carries the most notorious unit error in computing history. The 1.44 MB floppy disc holds neither 1.44 million octets nor 1.44 times 1,048,576. Its capacity is 1,440 kibioctets, which is 1,474,560 octets — the manufacturers multiplied a binary kilo by a decimal thousand and produced a figure that is correct in no system at all. It remains the standard illustration of why the IEC prefixes were needed.

Compact discs are cleaner: a standard disc holds about 700 megaoctets of data, or 74 to 80 minutes of audio, and that capacity was the practical limit for distributing software for a decade. Before them, distributing a program meant a box of floppies, and after them a DVD held about 4.7 gigaoctets, nearly seven times as much.

Memory sizes reached megaoctets in the early 1990s and stayed there for a decade. Four megaoctets was a comfortable amount in 1993 and inadequate by 1998, which tracks the arrival of graphical interfaces and the web. Today a single browser tab routinely holds more memory than an entire computer of that era.

The decimal-binary gap matters at this scale. A megaoctet is a million octets, but a mebioctet is 1,048,576, and a file reported as 100 MB by one program may appear as 95.4 MB in another. The difference is 4.9 per cent, small enough to overlook and large enough to cause arguments about whether a download completed correctly.

One megaoctet equals 1,000,000 octets, 1,000 kilooctets, 8 megabits, or about 0.9537 mebioctets.

Information about the Petabit (Pbit)

The petabit is a unit of digital information equal to a thousand terabits, or a million billion bits. Its symbol is Pbit. It sits at the boundary between quantities that are routinely deployed and quantities that still belong to research laboratories and to totals aggregated across whole networks.

A petabit is 125 teraoctets. That is the storage of roughly a hundred and twenty-five large consumer hard drives, or in more everyday terms about thirty thousand hours of high-definition video — three and a half years of continuous viewing. No single device holds a petabit; the figure describes systems rather than objects.

The most striking use of the unit is in optical transmission records. Research groups in Japan, the Netherlands and elsewhere have carried more than a petabit per second down a single strand of fibre, achieved by combining multi-core fibre — several light-guiding paths inside one cladding — with hundreds of separate wavelengths and advanced modulation. Those results run over tens of kilometres in the laboratory, not the thousands of kilometres a working sea cable must cross.

At the network level the petabit describes aggregate capacity. The total interconnect capacity of a large data centre, the combined capacity of all cables landing on a continent, and the peak throughput of the largest content networks are all quoted in petabits per second. These are sums over many links rather than the rating of any one of them.

Storage systems reach petabit scale too, though they are always labelled in octets. A large scientific archive holding a hundred petaoctets is holding eight hundred petabits, and facilities of that size exist for genomics, particle physics and astronomical survey data. The particle detectors at CERN discard the vast majority of what they see precisely because keeping it would exceed even these capacities.

The prefix peta comes from the Greek for five, because a petabit is a thousand raised to the fifth power in bits. That naming pattern continues upward with exa for six and zetta for seven, so the ladder above the petabit is regular and easy to extend.

One petabit equals 1,000,000,000,000,000 bits, 1,000 terabits, 125 teraoctets, or about 0.8882 pebibits.