[Meekro]

Those 40 hours of black screen probably compress pretty well. If that's not good enough, maybe reducing old/unwatched content to 480p would be a good alternative to just purging it?

Also, 4.3PB per day, at today's newegg HDD prices, is about $100k per day or $36.5 million per year. Yeah, you have to consider replication and whatnot, but you get the point-- this is pocket change for Google.

[anshumankmr]

Acquiring the SSD isn't the only cost, it's also paying for power, the cost of the buildings they are housed in, the staff to look after such hardware, hiring SREs to maintain availability etc which will also make it higher.

[ddtaylor]

That seems like moving the problem from memory to compute.