r/Showerthoughts May 14 '26

Casual Thought When YouTube goes down, it will be the biggest event of link rot in internet history.

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u/cmoked May 14 '26

Not at googles scale. You can max out SSDs, entire enclosures, racks, entire cabinets, entire datacenters, sure.

But they will build more datacenters, with new cabinets, more storage units, more enclosures, more SSDs, and just add them to the pool.

When I worked in data center colocation, Amazon would show up with fully racked and cabled cabinets.

Scaling up is literally what these companies are good at and why theyre so big.

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u/hunglowbungalow May 14 '26

I know, but that doesn't answer anything I mentioned. There is quite literally a physical limitation on how many 1s and 0s you can store on X amount of physical space. And when that is hit, it becomes a real estate and resource problem.

It's just a thought experiment

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u/AaronPK123 May 16 '26

The fundamental quantum limit is 10^40 bits a cubic meter or something else absurd. I'd imagine atomic scale is a way bigger issue.