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Anecdotally, Google's file system Colossus uses Reed-Solomon 1.5x replication. So those 150 drives might only turn out to be in the low 200's.

And I remember reading a tweet from a Google engineer that they would be paged if their free storage dropped below 5PB.

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I thought waking up at 3am, shambling to my desk and connecting to the VPN was bad. Imagine having to drive down to the datacenter and rack 200 hard drives.

Sweet, I appreciate that info :) I imagine 5PB fills up quite quickly for Google too!

At that scale, it's just a function of (number of ethernet cables) x (avg size of ethernet cables), rather than disk space in their data center, I'd imagine!

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