Goldman's 5-Terabyte Data Dump

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission says 2.5 billion pages was too much information

By Ira Boudway and Caroline Winter

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission says Goldman Sachs obstructed its investigation by delivering 5 terabytes, or 2.5 billion pages, of data in response to requests for information. Says FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides: "We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices and dump a bunch of rubbish."

5 TERABYTES, OR 2.5 BILLION PAGES, WOULD:

• take 159 years to print out on a laser printer

• cover 28,700 football fields

• fill 625 8-gigabyte flash drives

• make up 37.9 million copies of Bloomberg Businessweek

• weigh 12,500 tons, as much as 1,650 male elephants

• equal the entire Twitter archive given to the Library of Congress in April

Data: Bruce Nordman, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Library of Congress and Bloomberg Businessweek research

Boudway is a reporter for Bloomberg News. Winter is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

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