1) There is no such thing as "unlimited" anything with technology. Either you haven't read the fine print of your provider's terms or your provider will at some point have to change them.
2) What's interesting is that storage costs are dropping precipitously while they're restricting their customer's use of storage space. I just bought an 18 TB SATA drive for my main desktop that I paid $320 for. 100 TB just isn't that much space today.
>I just bought an 18 TB SATA drive for my main desktop
I think one of the big issues is the performance of the disk. At 200 MB/s (which is generous for a spinning disk) it would take more than 24 hours to read all the data from the disk.
With those kind of performance characteristics, I suspect that it makes redundancy and checking for integrity much more complicated.
On point 2, you can build a 100 TB "NAS" with an 8 drive chassis and 8 of the new 20 TB drives. Pricing should be under 5 or 6k USD unless you go crazy on the server. That should give enough extra to allow for a good bit of RAID parity and filesystem overhead etc.
I think it's less about storage quantity now, and more about the available bandwidth for access to that storage, if we assume 100 TB is reasonable for a whole university. If we assume parallel reads from all 8 drives at, say, 200 MB/s (which is likely optimistic and assumes one single linear workload), this will only get you 12 Gbps.
Throw multiple users and a need to seek, and rapidly the cost seems to be to become random access, latency and bandwidth (SSD caching in a tiered architecture etc).
This might help Google justify higher pricing for storage than the "raw" storage cost, if the market will bear it. Alternatively, maybe the solution is for Google to badge up a non Google Drive storage service in the education workspace suite for research data, based on more appropriate cloud storage offerings with glacier type tiers etc? Offer universities unlimited storage and people will find incredible things to store there you never dreamed of....
I wonder what's going to happen if or when YouTube starts to implement restrictions on how many videos you can upload. People are being conditioned year after year that they can go back to YouTube and expect to be able to upload videos at any time. There will probably be some level of strife if that were to suddenly change.
That would also bring into question if "significant" content creators would have more leverage to upload more videos than the average user. Then all the people that expect to be able to upload unlimited videos would either move off to a competitor, condition themselves to think otherwise, or something else.
Google would need more than one raw GB per GB, because there is some risk the drive would fail. I don't know what the answer would be, my NAS is a two bay solution, so I waste 50% of the capacity, a 4 bay one might only waste 25%. And that is without accounting for disk replacement cost, operating and electrictal costs and so on.
1) There is no such thing as "unlimited" anything with technology. Either you haven't read the fine print of your provider's terms or your provider will at some point have to change them.
2) What's interesting is that storage costs are dropping precipitously while they're restricting their customer's use of storage space. I just bought an 18 TB SATA drive for my main desktop that I paid $320 for. 100 TB just isn't that much space today.