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What do you think a petabyte of storage costs? SSDs currently start at $15k / PB and presumably Google’s pricing at volume is better. Data transfer is priced

What do you think a petabyte of storage costs? SSDs currently start at $15k / PB and presumably Google’s pricing at volume is better. Data transfer is priced by connection and not by bandwidth, so that cost will not scale linearly. https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=external_ssd,internal_ssd,m2_ssd,m2_nvme,u2 https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=e...

gberger 4y ago
I don't think the $15/TB figure is accurate. The list drives are either unavailable on Amazon, or they are external drives which would be unsuitable for a data center. I think we're looking at $75/TB on the lower end.
zamadatix 4y ago
Even the Amazon comments know that's a scam (well that and unavailable to actually purchase) and there is a reason the next disk in the list is 5x the price: > A 2T SSD for $38 sound to good to be true and of course they are a scam, don't buy they don't work But that's not even the biggest oversight here on storage, these drives also need to be attached to something which will need to be cooled, networked, and powered in a reliable enough way the service continues operating when you have 10s of thousands of these. You'll also need to store more than exactly the amount of data since you can't just lose videos any time there is a failure. In all it's still going to be dwarfed by encoding and bandwidth costs but that doesn't mean 15k/PB is any less an order of magnitude or two off on storage costs.
- alex_young 4y ago
  I'm really sorry I posted a price I found on a simple Google search. Let's say you're right and SSDs are actually $150/TB. Now our 1 PB is still just $150k. Not even a fraction of revenue worth worrying about.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    If the question was "how much would it cost to buy 1 PB worth of consumer grade SSDs" $150k sounds like a great answer. Going on the 1 PB/day Number that's ~$55M/year for some raw disk. Add another order of magnitude for needing more than just a raw disk to store 1 PB/day, as already explained, and that's ~500M/year on storage related costs. If you're hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter because the bandwidth cost (which is not paid per connection btw) would be much larger then sure but it's still unrelated to the cost of a standalone consumer SSD.
    - alex_young 4y ago
      That's not what I said. You've done this twice now, and I really wish you would respect the good faith principal others in this community value. I'll leave it at that.
      - zamadatix 4y ago
        Good faith interpretation requires a stance to build off from but so far you've made direct statements about consumer SSD prices & bandwidth billing without a stance on how it supports your conclusion then been reactionary when it was explained these statements weren't accurate or directly representative of storage costs. Beyond having already added that bandwidth costs will still dwarf storage costs even when storage costs is a large number I'm not sure what other good faith interpretations could have been made. It's not like I only attacked the consumer SSD price in bad faith and left it at that, I followed up with why even a corrected consumer SSD price would not provide an accurate estimate which was ignored to focus only on the SSD price correction. If there is a further good faith interpretation of what you've said you'd like added to the conversation then please point it out here and lead by example. Only pointing out you think the other person should have better respected the good faith doesn't serve to help anybody understand better, in fact it goes against the principle itself. As it stands the most solid interpretation I can come up with is still that raw SSD pricing for a consumer, even though higher than listed, can come out low enough to be less than a percentage of revenue for YouTube but this still holds no indication about storage costs actually being that low but I'm always open to stronger interpretations!

gberger 4y ago

I don't think the $15/TB figure is accurate. The list drives are either unavailable on Amazon, or they are external drives which would be unsuitable for a data center. I think we're looking at $75/TB on the lower end.

zamadatix 4y ago

Even the Amazon comments know that's a scam (well that and unavailable to actually purchase) and there is a reason the next disk in the list is 5x the price: > A 2T SSD for $38 sound to good to be true and of course they are a scam, don't buy they don't work But that's not even the biggest oversight here on storage, these drives also need to be attached to something which will need to be cooled, networked, and powered in a reliable enough way the service continues operating when you have 10s of thousands of these. You'll also need to store more than exactly the amount of data since you can't just lose videos any time there is a failure. In all it's still going to be dwarfed by encoding and bandwidth costs but that doesn't mean 15k/PB is any less an order of magnitude or two off on storage costs.

alex_young 4y ago
I'm really sorry I posted a price I found on a simple Google search. Let's say you're right and SSDs are actually $150/TB. Now our 1 PB is still just $150k. Not even a fraction of revenue worth worrying about.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  If the question was "how much would it cost to buy 1 PB worth of consumer grade SSDs" $150k sounds like a great answer. Going on the 1 PB/day Number that's ~$55M/year for some raw disk. Add another order of magnitude for needing more than just a raw disk to store 1 PB/day, as already explained, and that's ~500M/year on storage related costs. If you're hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter because the bandwidth cost (which is not paid per connection btw) would be much larger then sure but it's still unrelated to the cost of a standalone consumer SSD.
  - alex_young 4y ago
    That's not what I said. You've done this twice now, and I really wish you would respect the good faith principal others in this community value. I'll leave it at that.
    - zamadatix 4y ago
      Good faith interpretation requires a stance to build off from but so far you've made direct statements about consumer SSD prices & bandwidth billing without a stance on how it supports your conclusion then been reactionary when it was explained these statements weren't accurate or directly representative of storage costs. Beyond having already added that bandwidth costs will still dwarf storage costs even when storage costs is a large number I'm not sure what other good faith interpretations could have been made. It's not like I only attacked the consumer SSD price in bad faith and left it at that, I followed up with why even a corrected consumer SSD price would not provide an accurate estimate which was ignored to focus only on the SSD price correction. If there is a further good faith interpretation of what you've said you'd like added to the conversation then please point it out here and lead by example. Only pointing out you think the other person should have better respected the good faith doesn't serve to help anybody understand better, in fact it goes against the principle itself. As it stands the most solid interpretation I can come up with is still that raw SSD pricing for a consumer, even though higher than listed, can come out low enough to be less than a percentage of revenue for YouTube but this still holds no indication about storage costs actually being that low but I'm always open to stronger interpretations!