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.

  • okuhiko@lemmy.world
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    1 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@kbin.social
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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.

    • reliv3@reddthat.com
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      1 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@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

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

        • Still@programming.dev
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          1 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@lemmy.world
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      1 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@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 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.

    • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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      1 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?