This is what some the world's largest banks of malware look like stacked as hard drives | TechCrunch

"vx-underground, which says it has the largest collection of malware source code, said in a post on X that its archive of data amounts to about 30 terabytes."

"Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware across multiple antivirus engines at once, said his service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples that users have contributed to date."

"Let's say we're using 1 terabyte capacity internal hard drives, since these are generally designed to be the same physical size to fit inside any computer. These standardized 3.5-inch internal hard drives are 1 inch in height, which for the sake of stacking one on top of the other is really what we want to know here."

"Using this online conversion tool, it looks like vx-underground's 30 terabytes of malware data could fill 30 hard drives stacked on top of one another, reaching 30 inches, or about 2.5 feet tall."

vx-underground reported an archive of malware source code totaling about 30 terabytes. VirusTotal’s founder reported about 31 petabytes of malware samples contributed by users. These datasets are used by cybersecurity and AI researchers to train detection models and study how attacks evolve. To estimate physical scale, the calculation assumes standardized 3.5-inch internal hard drives with 1 terabyte capacity and 1 inch height each. Under these assumptions, 30 terabytes would occupy 30 stacked drives, reaching about 30 inches, or roughly 2.5 feet. The same approach implies the petabyte-scale collection would require vastly more drives and height.

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