I’ve lurked on the SDMB for years, and after seeing enough links to youtube I checked it out for myself.
It has every video/song from the 90’s that I grew up w/, I’m assuming that people have posted all of the 80’s/70’s/60’s as well. Throw in a ton of movies/funny pet vids/diet coke+mentos vids/etc. and you have an awful lot of storage space being used up somewhere.
My question is, is there any way to estimate how much memory youtube has? I remember when they were making Google Earth they were talking about how it was going to be over 1 terabyte, and that was huge at the time. That seems tiny by comparison to today’s YouTube.
So approximately, how big is YouTube (Memory-wise)? I’d also be interested in finding out approximately how much information is uploaded to it on a daily/weekly/ or monthly basis.
Also, do those little videos that teenagers send to each other (who might total 100 hits if lucky) stay there forever? Or do they delete threads with few views after 3 months or so?
Yeah, it’s way bigger now. That 2006 figure represented 6 million videos . Total videos uploaded as of March 17th 2008: 78.3 Million (link ). So they could be using 585TB now, if the compression rate is the same, etc.
Yeah, I remember hearing some theoretical name for what came after a terabyte back in college, but, wow. Never imagined there’d be a central location approaching said amount of storage within 5 years. :eek:
Think about Google 's storage in general. While it is not centralized, it does cache every web page into it’s search results. That has to be a lot of storage.
I uploaded a five-minute video to YouTube last night (my point-and-shoot camera takes surprisingly-high-quality videos). Maybe that put it over the line, and it’s now using one petabyte.
These questions are hard because Google and YouTube (which is owned by Google) are growing amazingly fast. I don’t have a cite but I did pay attention when I read about Google’s storage about a year ago. Back then, they were building data centers all over the world as fast as possible. IIRC, some of their data centers consist of more than 450,000 servers a piece. They have to build them very close to large power plants because that is the only way they can get enough juice. Their servers consist of plain vanilla regular PC’s that can just be dropped into place to join their network.
I guess at first glance 500 TB may sound like a lot, but I do a moderate amount of freelance video editing and have a couple of TB of video backed up. Granted DV is much less compressed than Youtube video, but still, for (I’m assuming) the largest video archive on the web to need only 200 times the storage space that 1 part time freelancer uses- it doesn’t seem like very much.
You can get 1TB drives for less than 200 bucks these days, so it pretty crazy to think that YouTube could fit all its content on less than $100,000 of equipment
