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Comment by Delmololo | Hacker News Reader

You can.

Yt for example deletes your 720p after a while and replaces it with a potato.

And if you watch a old not relevant yt and it starts after 10 seconds instead of now, no one really cares.

You can put that old highly encoded potato at your huge and cheap storage system de located somewhere around the globe were it's just cheap (energy).

You can also calculate in the time for a band robot and only store half or the first minute of that potato on your cheap storage and let the robot grab the rest of it.

After all if video is your main thing plenty of weird optimizations start to make sense.

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Or run 2-3 adds for 2 minutes each. Gives you plenty of time to fetch the video in the background.

I WISH it would be prefetching video in background while showing ads.

But no, always goes to spinny wheel buffering after ad ends. Oh, and thats after having some spinny wheel to load the ad in first place ffs.

No way, man! They don't want to interfere with the viewing experience of their primary revenue source! (Ads) :-)

They are definitely not fetching video in the background.

Fetch from cold storage to thier CDN; whilst they fill your bandwidth with ads.

> Yt for example deletes your 720p after a while and replaces it with a potato.

always bugs me to hell when i encounter a "high definition" video that has worse quality than pal/ntsc

But in a few years we will have 8k for all those videos with super AI upscalers.

ppl not big on 8k jokes anymore it seems

Tape robot time is NOT measured in minutes but hours. Also you wouldn't pull individual files like this out of tape.

Tape is for long term sunk storage, not cold infrequent access like a youtube video.

I know aws glacier has an "expedited retrieval time" of 1-5 minutes, but that is not how typical tape setups work. Frankly I would be very interested in what actually hides behind that product.

You can use big disk, but not be able to access all the files on the disk with the same frequency, so you have 20% of the disk dedicated to hot storage, and 80% of it to cold storage. Cold storage access is queued , so the 1-5 minutes can come from there.

Yeah I looked closer and I think they are basically just packaging up some kind of offering on top of spinning rust for the two first glacier tiers.

Glacier is not actually tape, the fancy tape-robot videos nonwithstanding. Most of it is just regular old S3 running on outdated storage hardware

Interesting. Why does it take hours to retrieve then? Network/disk bandwidth really is that bad? Also do you have a source for this?

To discourage access, maybe? That pushes you to use more expensive options.

This doesn't hold, not having the cheap option encourages you to use the expensive option even better...

It's mostly just bandwidth prioritization, slotting large transfers in when there is excess bandwidth.

You can tell this is the case for at least the flexible retrieval tier, because small objects can be returned in a few minutes, whereas larger requests take hours - if the files were actually on a tape drive somewhere, small requests couldn't be fulfilled dramatically faster than large ones, given that tape has shitty random-access performance.

(I used to work on a downstream team at AWS)

I believe you, I can see how it would make sense that AWS would create a tier to exploit the spare capacity in S3 disk bandwidth, just like they did for EC2 spare VM capacity with spot instances. Still it doesn't make intuitive sense to me how the performance AND the price can be so far. That's why I'd love a longer write-up if you know of any.

It's also weird that the retrieval gives you a regular fast S3 object you can then access. Given that it's already on that hardware, is a copy even happening?

Google gave up on tape a while back. Latest Google search indicates it is only used for air gapped backups. I don't OP was suggesting using tape though, especially with technologies such as hybrid SMR.

That's all true, but I don't think anyone mentioned tape storage.

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