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.

  • green_light_stop
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    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]
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      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
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      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]
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        61 year ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      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
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      61 year ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      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]
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      41 year ago

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

        • @[email protected]
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          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
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        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.