• 1. Michael  |  July 24th, 2006 @ 8:38 AM |     +0

  They seem to be going good so far, and man its google. I’m sure they have 120+ petabytes of space and If not its obviously false advertisement. I currently use 150+ mb of my email space.
  Maybe they dont have that much space, they are just assuming that everyone wont use the full 2gig+ right?
  Now I’m confused.. good thinking must I add :|

• 2. Joe  |  July 24th, 2006 @ 8:52 AM |     +0

  why is my name in capitals. sigh anyway.

  All i have to say is, thats a lot of space 127.9171556 petabytes i would be lucky to use up 0.1 in my life time.

• 3. tiandrive  |  July 24th, 2006 @ 11:44 AM |     --1

  A list of some Gmail applications:

  tiandrive..../gmail.htm

  Currently most of the applications are those using Gmail as online file storage space. Hope that the list is useful.

• 4. Rub3X  |  July 24th, 2006 @ 11:48 AM |     --1

  Heh cool nice list, glad to see some linux and mac apps out there. Too bad this article doesn’t look like it’s anywhere near making it to the digg homepage :(

• 5. bAWKED  |  July 25th, 2006 @ 6:01 AM |     --1

  Always interesting to know these things.. i got a gmail hack book, so i might start using it a bit more.
  I wont complain as long as they dont run out of space ^_^

• 6. Prashant Singh Pawar  |  July 31st, 2006 @ 9:48 AM |     --1

  Few things:
  Text Compression
  Forwarded mails, Replied Mails
  Common Attachments

  If you see all these things you will find that they actually require a lot less space then these, moreover GMail drive is illegal according to Google.

• 7. Prashant Singh Pawar  |  July 31st, 2006 @ 9:50 AM |     --2

  By the way, I used to run a web service for file sharing using your own google account. Had to shut down because all the WEbhosts were scared of google, so as soon as they came to know they kick us out.

  Basically it was a violation of google’s policies.

• 8. sushirama  |  July 31st, 2006 @ 1:32 PM |     --1

  127p is realtive childsplay now, when I was a storage engineer at HP before my job was shipped off to India we had built 2 of the largest SANs in the world at the time. (My office alone had a small 12TB system in it) The big one was well into the peda range and had 1500 servers attached and mapped It was used for protien modeling. We had done proof of concept for up to 8 exabytes on one 32 server cluster as one mounted volume (I think the National Reserve System was close but not on one volume). At the time only netware was capable of mounting a single volume that large and it was the only OS that would support more than 4 servers in a stable cluster. We were also working on a video archive system for Disney/ABC that would hold EVERY piece of film/video/audio tape done over some 75 years of disney - abc and whoever else they own. That was to be a prototype/proposal for a much larger National Archives System that would image everything under their domain like the Library of Congress. One of the largest issues with doing these systems is dealing with functional obsolesence not just over the typical 3 to 6 year life span of the hardware, but implementing a system that has to be maintained and updated for 75 to 100 years of technological advancement. Also at the time there was nothing on the market (and still isnt) anything that can back all that data up to tape or any other media efficiently other than a redundant array at another site. That was almost 5 years ago wonder what theyre up to now?

• 9. Roshan  |  August 1st, 2006 @ 1:12 PM |     +0

  man…. do you really think they dont have such amount of hard drives??? man … . they have clusters……. man…. otherwise how on the earth they have such amount of search data and stuff?? and i dont think they are out of money to do such a great thing… but actually, virtually no one is using entire amount of email. so, no worries.. they wont run outta space…

• 10. Rub3X  |  August 1st, 2006 @ 7:56 PM |     +0

  In my opinion GMail drive is against their TOS because they know if people started using it, their space would run out quite fast.

• 11. mehdi  |  August 22nd, 2006 @ 9:21 PM |     --4

  HI
  I NEED GMAIL ACCOUNT
  THANK YOU

• 12. Rub3X  |  August 23rd, 2006 @ 5:34 PM |     +0

  Here are some free GMail sign up links that were generated from an account :)
  mail.googl...e5c16644c0
  mail.googl...3e051923b2
  mail.googl...991bcde10d
  mail.googl...542b25a92b
  mail.googl...522157a4c5
  mail.googl...fd5f3567ff
  mail.googl...f403296e8a
  mail.googl...c22d64a5ad
  mail.googl...e6ec9eae52
  mail.googl...9370261abc
  mail.googl...4ad81af906
  mail.googl...c636ecb4f7
  mail.googl...50ae3e0146
  mail.googl...0d90b780a1
  mail.googl...2a350642ec

• 13. Jesse  |  August 25th, 2006 @ 4:09 PM |     +0

  I could definitely see this happening, yes.. When you have Bases for Google like the one they hav in california, you could imagine that there’s a -lot- of server room space. I would love to see google’s server rooms *drool*

• 14. Mauricio  |  September 11th, 2006 @ 4:44 AM |     +0

  Many people doesn’t use all the GMail storage. Google must have much of the 127.91 petabytes free on their hard drives, so, the backup don’t have all that size.

• 15. Thrawn  |  December 4th, 2006 @ 1:12 AM |     +0

  they do not actually have that much space

  Say I offered 100 mb to every user that asked me. I have a 250 gb HDD, so I can allow each user 100 mb, but I need to upgrade as the demands rise, not an initial buy

  get where I’m coming from?

  as long as they have extra, and cash to buy more, they can offer any amount to a user

  *just my take on it*

• 16. Mohamed  |  December 25th, 2006 @ 9:41 PM |     --1

  I am a proud Gmail user. Never worrying about email size, incredibly fast reply (powered by AJAX, a technology often used by Google), Web Clips,
  automatic forwarding, one button - click search, advanced filters, labels and not folders, message preview, automatic refresh, auto-save messages,as-good-as-yahoomail spam filters, not one executable to be sent or received, feeling of having a different technology? A definite recommendation for
  anyone that reads more than one email per day.
  Have you tried Gmail? If yes, what's your taste on it? Why do you love it/hate it?

• 17. Mike  |  December 26th, 2006 @ 12:38 AM |     +0

  I’d have to argue with your math logic just a bit. Yes, Google does offer 2747+MB of storage per person, but they never claim to dedicate that space for you. In my opinion, Google’s ever expending mailbox is a great marketing stunt because the mailboxes are far larger than 99% of people will currently use. It’s sort of like offering people 1,000 galllons of water a day as compared to 500 — there is an inherent limit that most people will stop below 50. Sure, some will use it to the max just because they can, but the vast majority simply has no interest in doing so. I do not know what their ratio is, but their actual storage capacity is certainly a fraction of what they offer as available to people (since it’s extremely unlikely every Gmail user will upload 2GB of data overnight). If that were to happen, Google is still held harmless because Gmail is (STILL) a beta product. Beta means it doesn’t have to work as advertised. They have no liability if it does or does not work as advertised. Beta… a wonderful thing.

  So, 127 petabytes? No. Backing up an additional 127 petabytes? Nope. They may not even back anything up (they don’t have to, anyway — beta). They probably do have some form of backup, but I’m sure it’s compressed (email is highly compressable). For that matter, the active gmail database may be compressed and decompressed in real-time. So that 2GB of email text becomes 150MB or less of storage space.

  There are lots of trick in the game they play. I’m just glad they play it, and they’re doing a GREAT job!!

  Mike in NY

• 18. Angel  |  December 30th, 2006 @ 12:11 AM |     +0

  I always find it funny that people look at theese numbers in “the raw”.

  Clearly some kind of compression scheme is in use for this - plain text like html and mails are very very compressable!
  I once compressed 30gigs of text logfiles down to less than 200mb - that says alittle about just how much text can be compressed.

  The people using tools like Gmail Drive are destroying this though - regular data like pictures, videos and executables mostly can’t be compressed very much.

  Though the high compression-ratio of text, and the fact that most people use below 10% of thier available space, I think its very safe to assume that Google has way more space available than required, and that they don’t have any problems making backups of it.
  (I personally work at a small company, and we daily make backups of over 100 Pb - so I’m sure google can match us lol)

• 19. Hemo  |  January 1st, 2007 @ 12:48 PM |     +0

  Google has search technology.
  Most of the data we e-mail to each other is copies of data. A picture or a film clip is e-mailed from me to some friends. They e-mail it to other friends. The same data should then be stored in everyones inn- and out-boxes.

  Here is my theory: Google only stores a peace of data once. For everyone else, they make a search reference.

  They only stores compressed versions of everything you write, and they only stores attachements (or parts of them) once.

  This is how Google can store “that much data”.

  But still; It is an amasing task!

• 20. Pat  |  January 1st, 2007 @ 5:18 PM |     +0

  I don’t know exactly what compression scheme they use, but as far as pictures, videos and so for are concerned there are plenty of technologies that don’t duplicate files. Meta data (filename, dates etc) can be stripped and stored separately to save space. So if you had a 10MB file that you emailed to 500 GMail users, it would barely take up more than 10MB before compression. Search for content addressed storage for more info.

• 21. tymonn  |  January 1st, 2007 @ 6:50 PM |     --1

  Look, we have 2800MB of storage, if i send an email with a 5MB mp3 to 10 of my friends, what do you think of this, 5*10… 50MB just because of one email i sent? No! those email has an ‘ID’ gmail system just needs to store 5MB, and add 11rows in the database with that ID, on mine it’ll be tagged as ’sent’ on the others as ‘inbox’ (and they do whatever they want with it). And 90% of the gmail users just use it for text.. so.. 3000 emails, its like.. 50MB? of text storage.

  if lots of people sends 5MB attachements to 10 friends, for each email, Gmail just needs to store 1/10 of it ;)

  and that supposing is that if we all use 2800MB.. and like.. only 5% of the users have it all ocupied.

  I guess they dont even have 1 Pentabyte…

• 22. klondike  |  January 3rd, 2007 @ 12:57 AM |     --1

  Just as a comment, although they could and probably use any system to store the attachments into a db, we must think that this attachment ID must could be increased to a level that it may be even larger than the size of the original mail, just let’s send millions of 1 byte mails to only one person and the counter or will reset/overflow or will have a bigger size than the original e-mail.

  Otherwise, the sent e-mail isn’t equal to the received one as the servers include some metadata in the e-mail so we can stop thinking on the system in which messages are saved with and unique ID, the only thing we can save is just the text/attachments it has.

  A last thing and for if none has thought on it, the attachment stored must have (as in some filesistems) the number of links to it in other camp so it could be deleted when everybody deletes them.

  For last but not least for larger attachments they probably use some kindo of hash system so if them are resent to a gmail user via another kind of account which has received it via gmail it could be reused. And probably internal e-mail as has been said don’t include the attachment but a link wich is also sent when internal mailing any user, and wich is changed by the file when you download/see the original message.

  Thanks for reading me ^^

• 23. Scott Simmons  |  January 10th, 2007 @ 5:05 AM |     --1

  “t’s sort of like offering people 1,000 galllons of water a day as compared to 500 — there is an inherent limit that most people will stop below 50.”

  I was working for AOL in the heyday of dialup. I still remember the great laugh my co-workers and I had when HQ announced their brand-new, latest and greatest offer for new customers: 1000 free hours! Only usable within the 45-day trial period, of course … I always wondered how many people actually did the math on that.

• 24. hari  |  March 19th, 2007 @ 3:44 AM |     +0

  How does Gmail works and what is the DataBase that Google use? How they provide that space? Do they use Harddisk and what is the hardware that they use for storing?

• 25. sofia  |  April 3rd, 2007 @ 1:04 PM |     +0

  I’ve used up all of my space at GMail tons of times since what? 2004 maybe? :) Since it’s been born! So they really do provide that much space… I still reach 100% from time to time!

• 26. Nat  |  July 2nd, 2007 @ 10:20 AM |     +0

  well i have pushed my gmail to 1gb - and it seems to be growing exponentially - it got me to thinking - what do i do when i push the limit - what happens when i reach the 2.7/8/9 limit - i am reluctant to delete my mail - email shows me where i was at a point in time - who i was communicating with - what i was thinking etc… it is the ultimate communication archive - what will google do when i hit 3gb? has anyone had this occur?

  re: Mohamed - i love gmail - it whoops the ass of any of the other web based mail systems i have used - i love the fact that everything is so searchable - i dont need to sort to folders - my chats are stored (i use gtalk all the time) - personally gmail et al is the best experience - simplicity of communication…

• 27. me  |  July 2nd, 2007 @ 4:10 PM |     +0

  they’ll be overselling - when you offer more space than you have and rely on people not using all of it.

• 28. spacemonkey  |  July 2nd, 2007 @ 4:35 PM |     +0

  127 petabytes is a LOT, but that’s not all there is.

  Don’t forget, what’s in those 50 million spam folders don’t count as part of utilization.

• 29. Handicomp  |  July 3rd, 2007 @ 4:42 AM |     +0

  Actually, it isn’t so hard to imagine at all. 127 Pb? Across how many servers? The thing you need to see is that all of our gmail accounts are NOT on one server, but are spread around all the servers. Therefore, my account is not on the same server as yours, and my account space isn’t on the same storage device as yours. Does Gmail actually have all that space? Undoubtedly! I have seen the biggest SANs around and it doesn’t take long to get that much storage on an app like gmail when you are dealing with multiple 1,500 server clusters!

• 30. nada  |  July 3rd, 2007 @ 2:20 PM |     +0

  I would guess that in addition to having advanced data compression, they base the amount of allocated storage on demand rather than theoretical maximum capacity. How many people do you know that have used up over 10% of the available capacity? The likelihood of a huge spike in data storage by your average email user is slim. This probably means they can offer much more than they expect to have used, as a kinda incentive to sign up.

• 31. mc2w  |  July 6th, 2007 @ 5:38 AM |     +0

  Some of the users dont use even close to the full inbox. Like me, I reguraly filter my mail, and right now its down to only 2 e-mails that contain my passwords for various sites. Probably 3 kb max.

• 32. tymonn  |  July 12th, 2007 @ 11:38 AM |     +0

  I’ve reached the maximum capacity of Gmail like 8 times already, when you share videos and mp3, it only takes 2-3months to do it.

• 33. Electric Shoots  |  July 13th, 2007 @ 11:16 PM |     +0

  Yahoo mail now has unlimited storage.

• 34. ding  |  July 17th, 2007 @ 5:50 AM |     +0

  remember 90% of their accounts have little to no usage, I have 6 accounts and I never use them mainly because I found that they never delete anything and I think that’s a privacy issue.

• 35. Adam  |  October 25th, 2007 @ 7:58 AM |     +0

  Ok, so Yahoo mail has offered unlimited emil storage, does this mean they have found a way of actually storing an unlimited amount of data? hmm, I’ve not read their T&C but they must have a fair use policy that states that 10G should be considered virtally unlimited to a normal user so that is the actual limit…

• 36. djh2400  |  October 30th, 2007 @ 9:25 PM |     +0

  I know this is extremely old, especially since I now have 4.7 GB of gmail space, but I wanted to say that there are not 1,000 bytes in a kilobyte, etc, there are actually 1024 (2^10), making those calculations inaccurate.

• 37. MerlinYoda  |  November 8th, 2007 @ 5:44 PM |     +0

  [quote comment="35207"]I know this is extremely old, especially since I now have 4.7 GB of gmail space, but I wanted to say that there are not 1,000 bytes in a kilobyte, etc, there are actually 1024 (2^10), making those calculations inaccurate.[/quote]

  Unfortunately, that’s not how hardware manufacturers see it (or apparently have ever seen it for quite some time (like pre-1970 even)). For example a “40 Gigabyte” drive is usually actually capable of storing roughly 40,000,000,000 bytes as opposed to (40 * 2^30) bytes … thus cheating the consumer out of some gigabytes as they claim somewhere in tiny print that a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

  In response to this separate abbreviations/measurements are being (have been?) adopted to combat the discrepancy. For example 2^10 bytes is a “kibibyte” (abbreviated KiB). I would suggest wikipedia for more info on this

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