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Google also gets the ability to leverage wasted search assets for YT. YT's video long tail is very low IOPs workload.

Search on the other hand is high IOPs.

As you scale out your HDD storage fleet its great to have the benefit of putting a Low IOPs high storage with a High IOPs low storage.

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This is interesting. Do you know for sure that YouTube actually runs on literally the same disks as the Google search index? Because I used to work for Bing and they definitely did not let any other services share hardware with the search hotpath. Serving search results was a case where every millisecond counted (even delays below the threshold of perception caused a stat-sig drop in revenue), and so even suggesting that the index should share disks with e.g. OneDrive would've gotten you laughed out of the room.

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