Comments on: GMail - How Do They Have So Much Space?

By: MerlinYoda

MerlinYoda — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:44:02 +0000

[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

By: djh2400

djh2400 — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:25:12 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 07:58:13 +0000

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…

By: ding

ding — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:50:35 +0000

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.

By: Electric Shoots

Electric Shoots — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 23:16:13 +0000

Yahoo mail now has unlimited storage.

By: tymonn

tymonn — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:38:09 +0000

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.

By: mc2w

mc2w — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 05:38:38 +0000

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.

By: nada

nada — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:20:06 +0000

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.

By: Handicomp

Handicomp — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 04:42:19 +0000

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!

By: spacemonkey

spacemonkey — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:35:33 +0000

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.

By: me

me — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:10:06 +0000

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

By: Nat

Nat — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 10:20:04 +0000

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…

By: sofia

sofia — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:04:59 +0000

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!

By: hari

hari — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 03:44:09 +0000

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?

By: Scott Simmons

Scott Simmons — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:05:11 +0000

“t’s sort of like offering people 1,000 galllons of water a day as compared to 500 â€” 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.