Yeah - our multi TB scan from two decades ago was a dolphin brain image which is a fair bit larger than mouse - and it was a stained sample that ended up being used as our demo image frequently because the contrast dyes set well and resulted in a very pretty visual overall.

I didn't meant to say that PBs of image data is common place - we had no image that approached that size - but people outside the domain of microscope scan results might be unfamiliar with just how chonky these image files would get traditionally.

I think a big thing that the enterprise comparison misses is that this is petabytes worth of dense data that has to be put through fairly heavy processing (some of which is currently custom for the specific experiment) and studied by a human.

It isn't just a giant database of small files and metadata blindly feeding a recommender system.

Several petabytes is definitely a staggering amount of data in that context of being analyzed by human eyes to extract some scientific value.