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Users of the internet seem to have difficulty finding what the “Peta-” prefix means, on account of some conflicting definitions, to include a small town in Greece, and well-known models such as Peta Wilson and Peta Todd.
As a result, this very important metric term is left in the shadows, and is nearly impossible to find the meaning of.
Doing my part in making information openly available on the internet, I created Peta.ca to allow inquiring minds become enlightened as to just what it is that the “Peta-” prefix means.
Why is this of importance?
In technology, storage sizes are rapidly increasing. Not too long ago, the megabyte was considered an enormous unit of measure, capable of storing more data than one might hope to need.
Over time, as technology progressed, and files became larger and larger, given the demand for high-resolution photography and high-definition video, the megabyte became dwarfed by the gigabyte (one billion bytes), and recently, the terabyte (one trillion bytes) hard drive came on the market as a widely available product, popular among musicians and creative professionals, who tend to handle very large files.
As progress would have it, the next unit of measure above tera (one trillion) is peta (one quadrillion), so we can only expect that terms beginning with “Peta-” will be more commonplace – and I certainly don’t want to leave people hanging with all these conflicting definitions.
So, without further adieu, here is the definition of the metric prefix “Peta-”…
Peta-: A metric prefix denoting 10 to the fifteenth power (1015), or 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion).
Examples of words which use this prefix include petametre, petabyte, and petasecond.
Wikipedia.org provides a very comprehensive list of other prefixes, which you may find interesting, considering the interest you are expressing in the “peta-” prefix by visiting this website.
This list may be accessed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix.
