How does YouTube, Google, etc. seem to have ‘unlimited’ storage for their users?
In: Technology
A lot of hard drives, distributed around the world and aggregated in large storage pools.
Evidently, the free space displayed in every accounts of every customer’s is not the real free space, it’s called thin provisioning where you let the software think he has more space then physically available, but you have mechanisms to plug in more hard drives when you reach certain thresholds.
Also they use techniques to reduce space taken by data like deduplication and compression where they store only one copy of identical « parts » (blocks) of several files.
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