this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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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.

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[–] green_light_stop@kbin.social 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] legion@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] seeCseas@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

every time it lags, it's because youtube has to send someone down to the basement to retrieve the correct blu-ray disc from a storage room

God bless those interns. Earning those college credits.

[–] WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

And that guy is out today..

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

That's the difference between getting a video served off a disk off in some random DC in some random state vs. the videos being served off a cache that lives at your ISP.

It's not offline storage vs. disk, it's a special edge-of-network cache vs. a video that doesn't live in that cache, but is still on a hard drive.

[–] valaramech@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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
[–] bustrpoindextr@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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

[–] BURN@lemmy.world 7 points 1 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”

[–] peter@feddit.uk 6 points 1 year ago

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

[–] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] green_light_stop@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://engineering.fb.com/2015/05/04/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook-s-cold-storage-system/

This is an article from 2015 where Facebook/Meta was exploring Blu-ray for their DCs. You're definitely right though. Tape is key as the longest term storage.

[–] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

2015 was quite a while ago tho.

[–] saiturihiiva@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

Shh, don't say that. It feels like just a few years at most.

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] green_light_stop@kbin.social 2 points 1 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.

[–] peter@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago

Where did you get that from?