I know memory is fairly cheap but e.g. there are millions of new videos on youtube everyday, each probably few hundred MBs to few GBs. It all has to take enormous amount of space. Not to mention backups.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    1091 year ago

    Google just has a lot of storage space. They have dozens of data centers, each of which is an entire building dedicated to nothing but storing servers, and they’re constantly adding more servers to previous data centers and building new data centers to fit even more servers into once the ones they have are full.

    IIRC, estimates tend to put Google’s current storage capacity somewhere around 10-15 exabytes. Each exabyte is a million terabytes. Each terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. That’s 10-15 billion gigabytes. And they can add storage faster than storage is used up, because they turn massive profits that they can use to pay employees to do nothing but add servers to their data centers.

    Google is just a massive force in terms of storage. They probably have more storage than any other organization on the planet. And so, they can share a lot of it for free, because they’re still always turning a profit.

    • green_light_stop
      link
      fedilink
      35
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      There are also techniques where data centers do offline storage by writing out to a high volume storage medium (I heard blueray as an example, especially because it’s cheap) and storing it in racks. All automated of course. This let’s them store huge quantities of infrequently accessed data (most of it) in a more efficient way. Not everything has to be online and ready to go, as long as it’s capable of being made available on demand.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        241 year ago

        You can feel it on YouTube when you try to access an old video that no one has watched in a long time.

      • valaramech
        link
        fedilink
        131 year ago

        It’s far more likely that Google, AWS, and Microsoft are using tape for high-volume, long-term storage.

        According to diskprices.com, these are the approximate cost of a few different storage media (assuming one is attempting to optimize for cost):

        • Tape $0.004 - $0.006 / GB
        • HDD $0.009 - $0.012 / GB
        • BluRay $0.02 - $0.04 / GB
        • SSD $0.035 - $0.04 / GB
        • microSD $0.065 - $0.075 / GB
        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          61 year ago

          Tape archives are neat too, little robot rearranging little tape drives in his cute little corridor

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        61 year ago

        Tape drives are still in use in a lot of places too. Enormous density in storage for stuff that’s in “cold storage”

      • Big P
        link
        fedilink
        61 year ago

        I don’t think the storage density of a blu ray is anywhere near good enough for that use

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        51 year ago

        Doesn’t BR only have like 100 gigs capacity? That would take a shitton of space.

        They use tapes for backups, but indeed there ought to be something inbetween.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        41 year ago

        They’re really using optical storage as a backup that can then be near-instantaneously accessed? That’s awesome.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            11 year ago

            I think that was just an example. Tiered storage is fairly common, though. NVMe SSDs are faster than SATA SSDs, which are way faster than hard drives. Amazon has a “glacier” tier of cloud storage which is pretty cheap, but it can take time (hours) or money to download your data. Great for backups though.

        • green_light_stop
          link
          fedilink
          21 year ago

          Super cool, blew my mind! I would love to see it in operation. The logistics from the machine side + the storage heuristics for when to store to a disc that’s write-only sounds like a really cool problem.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      121 year ago

      Let’s be honest, it isn’t “free”. The user is giving their own data to Google in order to use there services; and data is a commodity.

      • Zoot
        link
        fedilink
        41 year ago

        Kinda starting to seem like “data” is becoming less and less valuable, or am I wrong?

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          61 year ago

          well there’s more and more of it so the value per byte is decreasing as everything tracks you and there’s only so much info you can get

    • jrs100000
      link
      fedilink
      81 year ago

      And thats just Google. Amazon and Microsoft also run also have massive massive data capacity that runs large chunks of the internet. And then you get into the small and medium sized hosting companies, that can be pretty significant on their own.

    • @obviouspornalt
      link
      31 year ago

      15 exabytes sounds low. Rough math, 1 20 TB hard drive per physical machine with 50,000 physical machines is one exabyte raw storage. I bet 50,000 physical machines is a small datacenter for Google.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      11 year ago

      It’s still wild to imagine. That’s amillions hard drives, times a couple times over for redundancy over regions and for failures. Then the backups.

      Remember when Google started by networking old office computers?