It’s far from useless.

How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they’re paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There’s also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.

The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you’ll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.

If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.

The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don’t read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn’t have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?