How YouTube Stores 500 Hours of Video Every Minute

Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. None of it is stored on a single hard drive with your name on it. Instead, videos are broken into chunks, replicated across multiple data centers, and managed by Google's Colossus storage system — a self-healing architecture that treats hardware failure as normal. In this episode, we unpack the three questions behind YouTube's storage miracle: how the infrastructure actually works, how much data we're talking about (exabytes upon exabytes), and how Google can offer unlimited free uploads when no one else can. The answers involve disaggregated storage, predictive caching, custom hardware, and an economic model where the marginal cost of storing one more video is measured in fractions of a cent.