How much data is in Amazon S3?

Today, Werner Vogels mentioned in his blog post Happy Birthday, Amazon S3! about the second birthday of Amazon S3 and also shared that by Jan 2008, S3 is storing 14 billion objects. I am not sure why Werner and others at Amazon are so cagey about sharing actual storage capacity used in AWS. In the past, I also have met with either silence or "trade secret" or "competitive advantage" response to my inquiries.

In my opinion, it only creates room for speculation as I am going to do with this post. So, how much data is stored on S3?

My initial guesstimate for stored data volume is between 14 and 70EB (Yes, EB is Exabyte) based on the published information about the size of individual object being one to five GB. Doesn't it seem very high? At first, it did to me. I have been trying to come up with alternate methods to estimate stored data volume like the typical size and type of data being stored by various services that are using S3. Even with an average value of 100MB per object, the stored data volume comes out to be 1.4 Exabyte, still a huge number for such a young service.

What is your estimate? Any suggestions on estimation method to arrive at more accurate number for data volume stored on S3.

Considering that S3 may be hosting Exabyte or more of data with in two years of existence, no wonder all established vendors EMC, IBM, HP and Dell are salivating on getting a piece of the "Cloud Storage" pie.