Actually I doubt that this is a true statement and not something to discourage others. Check out these queries: https://www.google.com/search?q=1 12B results https://www.google.com/search?q=an 9B results https://www.google.com/search?q=the 6B results If we estimate that about half of all English pages contain 'the' or 'an' article we'll have about 15B English pages. If half of all pages contain the '1' then the total number of pages is about 24B. If half of all the pages are in English then the total number of all the pages is 30B. So even the maximum is less than the "hundreds". Similar numbers are at https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/

What is fast storage? Is that, for right now, the fastest SSDs available?

HDD is definitely not enough because of low iops, likely Google keeps index in RAM. I think NVME should be good enough, idk for sure.

Ah. I thought that fast storage was a more specific type of storage that might be more expensive. I mean 1000tb is expensive, but it’s feasible to get to that scale with the right funding.