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Comment by digler999 | Hacker News Reader

disks have hit 10tb per 3.5" disk, which means you could have petabytes in each rack. I think we're at the point now where the materials are almost "free" compared to the amount of information you can fit on them.

Plus, they mine the shit out of that data. Even if they're not earning ad revenue on it, they're tracking location, usage statistics, I wouldn't be surprised if their user agreement includes the ability to have AI "watch" the video and try to mine data about what's happening in the video the same way they mine your email to build smarter and more effective consumer profiles about you. So even with nobody watching your video, I wouldn't put it past the "G-men" to find a way to eke some profit off it.

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It does.

Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored. [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/policies/terms/

i (dis)like how it spins it as a benefit to you.

Youtube videos are tailored towards my interests so there are some benefits.

Not saying you're wrong, but the first sentence of the article is "One of the largest cost drivers in running a service like Flickr is storage." Sure doesn't sound "free" or even "almost free" to me.

According to Parkinson's Law, data will always expand to fill available storage.

We may have petabytes for rack, but 4K videos are coming.

wiki.c2.com/?ParkinsonsLaw

I'd say 4K videos are already here. My Lumia 950, released late 2015, records in 4K by default, and the iPhone 6S, released around the same time, also supports it.

They aren't the norm, but I imagine YouTube sees a fair number of 4K uploads.

I do agree, although I think the 4k will take longer than it may seem. For instance 99% videos uploaded to YouTube are smaller than 4k.

And the trend is not improving much (or at all). By comparing video uploads to YouTube from last two years, the trend is roughly the same: only 1.1% of videos are in 4k [620M videos, 7M in 4k for 2016; 322M videos, 3.6M in 4k].

> 4K videos are coming

Yes, but screens increase in resolution very slowly, and you're physically limited in how much resolution you can get on a small sensor.

And video compression is improving quite impressively.

So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos.

I'm sure there will be plenty of demand, it comes through changes in the way we use things.

> So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos.

Is that true? I've been pricing hard drives recently, and they seem to have stagnated for the last few years, staying at about the same price, with the best value per Gb at around 4Tb.

I thought h265 took about half the space of h264 for the same quality, but a 4k screen is actually 4x the pixels of 1080p...

So I'm guessing 4k h265 would be about double the bitrate of 1080p h264.

The price of hard drives is still dropping, there were just some setbacks from the flood. http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm

More importantly, don't just look at a year or two. 1080 availability is significantly more than a decade old. In fact, you should probably be comparing against 1080 mpeg-2. That gets you nearly the same bitrate between then and now. In that time hard drives have gone from ~1GB per dollar to 35GB per dollar.

Luckily, we're just starting an appetite for 360 videos and videos with depth are somewhere on the horizon as well.

Coming? The iPhone 7 already records at 4K.

By "4K videos are coming" I think he meant that 4K will soon become the norm, not that it is currently impossible.

We can fit almost a PB in 4U (with flash, which has even better densities than 10TB/3.5"). You can have multiple PBs in a rack.

Technically you could almost do that with spinning disks. I've seen chassis that do 60 3.5" drives in 4U.

With 10TB drives that could be 6PB or more in a single rack.

For original photo storage which is primarily write once w/ rare if ever deletes and infrequent reads, you could potentially get by with PMR drives, further reducing the cost.

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