""We want more storage" : What's up ?"

#PokemonGO: While it's quite tempting to summarize this topic by "No you don't, stop hoarding for nothing", I think we can all agree that such a thread isn't going to help anyone here.So first and foremost : What will this topic be about ?Well, while I'm not Niantic, I will still try to give you a few things to think about for next time you wanna talk about storage.Now, before I dive in technical explanations that may or may not interest you, I want you to ask yourself a question first.If storage increase is as easy as flipping a switch for Niantic, then why is it so difficult for them to do it ?...If you couldn't find an answer to this question, then you probably realize by now that there is most likely more going on behind the scenes.With that out of the way, let's go !Storage :I'm talking physical storage, not pokémon storage.Our game data/save files is probably THE most important thing for Niantic to keep, aside their company data, to secure and keep online at all costs. Just imagine the chaos for players if they lose even a fraction of this data.Furthermore, we are constantly accessing and writing on data to the servers, so Niantic needs a seriously robust solution to support however many players are out there catching their 'mons.All that to say : NO, your data is certainly not stored on a cheap 1TB HDD that costs 65$ or something.How our data are (probably) stored and how it works.As said earlier, The storage needs to be robust and quickly accessible for players, so we can probably assume SSD are in the works hereAs for how our data is secured, I'll be assuming that they use the most secure way that I know of : RAID 15What is RAID 15 ?RAID stands for "Redudancy Array of Inexpensive Disks". Basically, a way to put drives together in order to allow redundancy and allow for options like combining storage to make accessing data faster (Since it's read on multiple drives instead of a single one)There are multiple ways of forming a RAID, but I'll only cover RAID 15 here.RAID 15 is actually a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 5 (in this order)RAID 1 is a type of RAID all about redudancy :Let's say you have 2drives of 1TB. You put them together in a RAID 1 : This only gives you a total storage on 1TB instead of 2TB, but the catch is : The data written on one disk will replicate on the other, so if one of your drive breaks, you don't lose any data because they're still on the other drive. This gives you time to replace the faulty drive with a new one which will start replicating data from the other functioning drive in order to restore the full RAID 1.This allows to not lose access to your data, even for a slight second.However, obviously, your data is lost when both drives breaksYou need at least 2 drives to build a RAID 1​RAID 5 is about combining increased storage and security :Let's say you have 3 drives of 1TB. You put them together in a RAID 5 : The total storage goes up to 2TB. 1 disk worth of storage is used for what we call "Parity". To sum it up, it's a way of rebuilding data in case a drive breaks. (If 2 or more breaks before any is replaced, the whole storage is lost)Data is also read and written among every disk of the RAID 5, which heavily increases the speed of writing and reading data of the drives.Only 1 drive worth of storage is used for the Parity, so if you have 10 drives of 1TB, your total storage is 9TB)You need at least 3 drives to build a RAID 5​So, for a RAID 15 :You need at minimum 3 groups of RAID 1 to build a RAID 5, which basically amounts to 6 drives already (See how this is already starting to get expensive for not much storage ?)The result grants some crucial benefits :Massive speed of Read/Write increase : Data written and read among 6 drivesHeavily robust : Up to 3-4 drives can fail at once before the whole storage falls apart (A whole RAID 1 group + 1 drive from the other 2 RAID 1 groups)HOWEVERThere are heavy drawbacks with this method.First obviously, storage inefficiency, since you are using a lot of drives for only a little storage at the end.The second is maintenance.Since the drives are gonna have to handle a lot of reading/writing operations, they need to be heavily robust. Such drives are already expensive, but the thing is : They are gonna break, sooner or later, and they're gonna need to be replaced. I'm not sure about the durability of Niantic's storage, but since we are so many players around the world, it wouldn't surprise me if such failures were happening daily. This is only my 2 cents and shouldn't be taken AT ALL as truth/fact. The thing is : Drives break.Also, when a drive is in the process of rebuilding itself, it needs to read at all time the data present on other disks, effectively killing the performance of the whole storage during the rebuilding time.Lastly, and the most important point :ONCE A RAID IS BUILT, YOU CANNOT EXPAND THE STORAGE BY MERELY ADDING MORE DRIVES.You can expand it, but as far as I'm aware, it's a complex and long operation, often at the risk of losing all data on every drives (Which is certainly not an option here)​And there we go, that was my small contribution to this gigantic thread. There might be some inaccuracies in my technical explanations (I'm bad at this) but I think I got the basic idea covered. Don't hesitate to do your own research on Google if I got you interested in this stuff.So please, next time you wanna complain about storage, think about why it isn't coming as fast as events in the first place rather than harass Niantic (and TSR) about it.And for those of you who skipped directly at the end of this post :tl;dr : Increasing your pokémon storage may be a very difficult operation technically speaking, please read the whole post for more info and stop harassing them for more storage, they promised you some in the near future, so it's coming soon ™ . Please stay patient. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2RLg3RA