You can make educated guesses about which range the compute/storage ratio is in if you look at e.g. public information from talks like http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw

You can make educated guesses about which range the compute/storage ratio is in if you look at e.g. public information from talks like http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Keynote.pdf http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Ke... (it has other useful information that might not have been mentioned anywhere before, like the crazy Colossus on Colossus... or D, the GFS chunkserver replacement) You can use that to revisit Randall Munroe's estimates: https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/ You can infer from some of the comments that e.g. very dense disk capacity is not a good idea. There's more, of course, but I can't go into details (ex-Googler).