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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I did some quick math on this. The top plan Google sells is 30TB, to reach 5M files in 30TB, you'd have to fill the entire thing with 0.75MB files. So yeah, if you are using Google drive as some kind of JSON blob storage, it isn't designed for your use case.

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For 30TB I think it would be 6MB, but regardless, that appears to be per-user. If you're an individual needing 5m files, maybe you need a specialist storage solution, and if you're a business then that's one hell of a bus factor.

Ah yeah you are right, I had selected terabit instead of terabyte in the converter.

Makes me wonder if the limit was actually as much for finding run away internal code. I’m sure there’s cases deploying something like Google Drive where code went rampant making duplicates or something.

My guess is someone wrote some stupid "Google drive file name FUSE mount" script that attempted to exploit unlimited file storage in metadata. So some team working on Drive ran a query and saw 5M files is enough for basically anyone.

This reminded me of early days running AWS SQS. We didn't charge for storage as message size was limited and the expectation was any message was going to be read immediately... But sure enough some users would just leave messages there forever and we could never figure out what they were trying to do except maybe exploit it for free storage somehow.

Oh that's been done many times, including by Googlers. For example: https://github.com/asjoyner/shade

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