We have thumb drives that can store petabytes of data?

Or did you mean the "big data" crowd which thought 500GB was noteworthy? I don't think anyone took those serious, neither in 2010s nor now. That was always "small" data

Most companies using term "big data" had datasets in TB region. One company I had a gig at had full Hadoop cluster setup and their whole dataset was 40GB. Their marketing had all the big data adjacent keywords over the brochures for clients.

That's a decent quality 3 hours movie :D

My rule of thumb was "can it fit in RAM on a server?" If it can, then it's not big data.

500GB is in the "fits" category.

You can quadruple that and could still fit in server RAM

Correct, and until then it won't be "big data"

> We have thumb drives that can store petabytes of data

We do?

It was a question that you've edited out the punctuation. You're asking the exact same thing as the person you've replied

Please provide a link.

You would need 4 and change of these 245tb Kioxias to hold 1 petabyte, and an entire server grade computer to run them.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/kioxia-unvei...

Or 250 of these ~$400 4tb flash drives and an insane number of dongles to connect them all:

https://www.slashgear.com/1847725/largest-usb-thumb-drive-hi...

Plus one more for your parity drive.

To some degree IMO big data is still a mindset when it might take a day to process your data in a normal SQL query. Some tech doesn't scale to the data size for all use cases, and you need different solutions.