[ksec]

That storage number is highly likely to be off by an order of magnitude.

400KB/s, or 3.2Mbps as we would commonly use in video encoding, is quite low for original quality upload in FHD or commonly known as 1080p. The 4K video number is just about right for average original upload.

You then have to take into account YouTube at least compress those into 2 video codec, H.264 and VP9. Each codec to have all the resolution from 320P to 1080P or higher depending on the original upload quality. With many popular additional and 4K video also encoded in AV1 as well. Some even comes in HEVC for 360 surround video. Yes you read that right. H.265 HEVC on YouTube.

And all of that doesn't even include replication or redundancy.

I would not be surprised if the total easily exceed 100EB. Which is 100 (2020 ) Dropbox in size.

[jl6]

For comparison, 100-200EB is roughly the order of magnitude of all HDDs shipped per quarter:

https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/07/11/disk-drive-numbers/

[zozbot234]

Sure but exabyte-level storage is done with tape, not HDDs.

[mkl]

I doubt any of YouTube is being served off tape. Some impressive amount of its data is probably served from RAM.

[zozbot234]

I mean, it would explain the minutes-long unskippable ads you get sometimes before a video plays. There's probably an IT maintenance guy somewhere, fetching that old video tape from cold storage and mounting it for playback.

[therealdrag0]

I don’t have ads. No wait times.

[xapata]

> EB

I pine for the day when "hella-" extends the SI prefixes. Sadly, they added "ronna-" and "quetta-" in 2022. Seems like I'll have to wait quite some time.

[matzf]

> Originally 'quecca' had been suggested for 1030 but was too close to a profane meaning in Portuguese

(from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1681-7575/ac6afd, via wikipedia)

Seems like we missed opportunity to have an official metric fuckton.

[vasco]

For anyone wondering "queca" would be the normal spelling of the "profanity" although it's probably one of the milder ways to refer to "having sex". "Fuck" would be "foda" and variations. Queca is more of a funny way of saying having sex, definitely not as serious as "fuck".

Hyundai Kona on the other hand was way more serious and they changed it to another Island in the Portuguese market. Kona's (actual spelling "cona") closest translation would be "cunt", in the US sense in terms of seriousness, not the Australian more light one.

Source is I'm portuguese

[xapata]

> Two of the suggestions made were brontobyte (from 'brontosaurus') and hellabyte (from 'hell of a big number'). (Indeed, the Google unit converter function was already stating '1 hellabyte = 1000 yottabytes' [6].) This introduced a new driver for extending the range of SI prefixes: ensuring unofficial names did not get adopted de facto.

Rats. So close!

[otteromkram]

We should petition for "fukka-"

[financypants]

So is YouTube storing somewhere in the realm of 50-100EB somewhere? How many data centers is that?

[38]

> The 4K video number is just about right for average original upload.

No, it definitely is not.

[ksec]

For Smartphone / CE grade recorded video. Not for professional ones. Remember that number is average.

[ipaddr]

4k is not the average. The amount of sd videos out number hd and of the hd most are 1p max.

[38]

What is 1p?

[ipaddr]

1k. 1280x1024

[38]

It's not the average in either case.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I was under the impression that all Google storage including GCP (and replication) is under 1ZB.

IIUC, ~1ZB is basically the entire hard drive market for the last 5 years, and drives don't last that long...

I suspect YouTube isn't >10% of all Google.