"Fifty terabytes is equivalent to 50,000 gigabytes. One gigabyte can contain 10,000 pages of documents, the department estimated. By extrapolation, 50 terabytes can hold 500 million pages."
I can't find the court filing at the moment, but I would be amazed if even a small majority of the 50TB were 'pages of documents'. Looks like he got away with databases to me.
edit: Found the filing http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf
10TB can thus hold 500 million.
Of course, graphics, audio, video files etc. can severely increase the size.
Minor quibble (although bit groggy so correct me if I am wrong), but surely if 1MB holds 500, 1GB holds 500,000, 1TB 500,000,000 so 10TB holds 5 billion.
I just find it unlikely that 500m (or even 5b) of normal documents detailing operations exist at a single organisation, even with attached multimedia. Certainly possible, but seems off? Databases seem like the more likely chunk of the haul.
Not suggestion anything nefarious going on, just noting it is an odd way to describe the likely data.
You lost a factor of ten. 500 times 1000 is 500,000 so 1GB can hold 500,000 pages. 1TB can hold 500 million.
P.S. 6 TB drives are now very common, and 8TB drives are widely available, but more expensive.
Storage got cheap and easy to manage for regular consumers over the last few years.