Hey everyone, I've been tasked with creating a social network for an industrial company that has 96,000 employees across multiple countries, where employees can share photos and short videos about the company's tools. The issue at hand is determining the amount of HDD space needed for this purpose. Videos will be limited to only one minute, but it's still important to have enough storage space to avoid future problems.

 Initially, I considered offering a server with 30 TB (6 disks of 5 TB each), but upon further evaluation, I'm not confident that this will suffice. While it's not necessary to have all the space available immediately, I don't want the customer to face any issues with full disks after only 6 months.

A hard drive is an essential part of any computer as it stores all the information that the computer and user work with, whether it's a personal or corporate computer. However, the demands on a hard drive greatly differ depending on the number of users who require access to the data. While a single user may use a home hard drive, corporate hard drives must be more reliable, faster, and stable since thousands of users rely on them for work-related tasks.

When it comes to choosing a hard drive, SAS and SATA drives are the most commonly used in the market. The SAS interface allows for direct connections between high-speed, low-capacity SAS drives and slower but more capacious SATA drives. Additionally, SAS supports faster data transfer rates and can connect to slower SATA devices. Furthermore, SAS configurations are simpler to install and have inherited the reliability of SCSI hard drives.

When choosing between SAS and SATA hard drives, it's important to consider how many simultaneous diverse requests the disk will handle and how many users will require access to the data. For large-scale systems serving numerous users, SAS is the logical choice to ensure optimal performance and reliability.

We need to estimate how much content will be created. Assuming a diverse participation across the 96,000 employees, let's estimate a reasonable average for the number of uploads per day.

If we assume that each employee uploads approximately one piece of content every week, that would lead to about 13,714 uploads per day (assuming 96,000/7). Given that we're focusing on videos, let's choose a standard bitrate for decent quality. A one-minute video with a resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p) at a bitrate of 5 Mbps would roughly consume about 37.5 MB per minute.

So, if we calculate this:
13,714 videos/day * 37.5 MB/video = around 513,525 MB or about 513.5 GB per day.

Now, over the course of six months (roughly around 180 days), that would lead to:
513.5 GB/day * 180 days = about 92,430 GB.

Converting that into terabytes gives us approximately 92.4 TB.

Considering you originally planned for 30 TB, it's quite clear that this will be insufficent. Also, we should think about additional space for growth and backups. It is generally advisable to have at least a 30-50% buffer to prevent issues related to unforeseen increases in usage or file sizes.

Therefore, I would recommend at least 140 TB in total to be safe. This ensures we have the space to not only cover the uploads but also factor in extra growth, data integrity, and possibly even transcoding for different video formats in the future.

Keeping all these in mind, you should revise your server storage strategy to accommodate the larger requirement and avoid any headaches for your client down the line.