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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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There are also techniques where data centers do offline storage by writing out to a high volume storage medium (I heard blueray as an example, especially because it's cheap) and storing it in racks. All automated of course. This let's them store huge quantities of infrequently accessed data (most of it) in a more efficient way. Not everything has to be online and ready to go, as long as it's capable of being made available on demand.
You can feel it on YouTube when you try to access an old video that no one has watched in a long time.
every time it lags, it's because youtube has to send someone down to the basement to retrieve the correct blu-ray disc from a storage room
Actual footage of data being manually retrieved from Google's datacentre
God bless those interns. Earning those college credits.
And that guy is out today..
That's the difference between getting a video served off a disk off in some random DC in some random state vs. the videos being served off a cache that lives at your ISP.
It's not offline storage vs. disk, it's a special edge-of-network cache vs. a video that doesn't live in that cache, but is still on a hard drive.
It's far more likely that Google, AWS, and Microsoft are using tape for high-volume, long-term storage.
According to diskprices.com, these are the approximate cost of a few different storage media (assuming one is attempting to optimize for cost):
Tape archives are neat too, little robot rearranging little tape drives in his cute little corridor
Tape drives are still in use in a lot of places too. Enormous density in storage for stuff that’s in “cold storage”
I don't think the storage density of a blu ray is anywhere near good enough for that use
Doesn't BR only have like 100 gigs capacity? That would take a shitton of space.
They use tapes for backups, but indeed there ought to be something inbetween.
https://engineering.fb.com/2015/05/04/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook-s-cold-storage-system/
This is an article from 2015 where Facebook/Meta was exploring Blu-ray for their DCs. You're definitely right though. Tape is key as the longest term storage.
2015 was quite a while ago tho.
Shh, don't say that. It feels like just a few years at most.
They’re really using optical storage as a backup that can then be near-instantaneously accessed? That’s awesome.
Super cool, blew my mind! I would love to see it in operation. The logistics from the machine side + the storage heuristics for when to store to a disc that's write-only sounds like a really cool problem.
Where did you get that from?
I think that was just an example. Tiered storage is fairly common, though. NVMe SSDs are faster than SATA SSDs, which are way faster than hard drives. Amazon has a “glacier” tier of cloud storage which is pretty cheap, but it can take time (hours) or money to download your data. Great for backups though.