As you may have heard, Microsoft has officially completed its transfer of all users of its Hotmail email service to the new Outlook.com site. This resulted in having to transfer a whopping 150 petabytes of data from Hotmail to Outlook.com, which Microsoft said only took six weeks to accomplish.
But you may be saying to yourself: "just how big is 150 petabytes of data?". Sure, you might think that having a 4 TB hard drive inside your PC rig is a lot of storage but that"s peanuts compared to the numbers that Microsoft had to deal with.
Thankfully, Microsoft has created a new infographic that gives us an idea of how much data really is contained in 150 petabytes. In the most basic of terms, it"s a lot; really, it"s a whole big bunch of data. As the infographic shows, it would take a person 300,000 years to listen to 150 petabytes of music on their media player.
If you used Outlook.com to send 50 emails a day, with each email 75 KB in size, it would take you 120 million years to send 150 petabytes worth of emails. By that time, the human race would likely be either extinct or evolve into another form of life that leaves their physical bodies for energy. Yes, we do watch Star Trek.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft