A couple years ago I found out Google was already using 8TB+ drives in production before they hit the wide retail drive distribution market, so I would reckon t

A couple years ago I found out Google was already using 8TB+ drives in production before they hit the wide retail drive distribution market, so I would reckon that many companies with deep pockets and inside vendor relationships would be able to get access to some very high density disks that folks like Backblaze may not be able to get yet. There's also possibilities for better density through solid state that may not make much sense from a raw $ / GB storage basis that drives Backblaze while tiered storage may be essential for how Dropbox operates. Also, I imagine it'd be possible to centralize and strengthen cooling while shoving a bunch of disks into a 4U box to increase raw drive density. For example, you could use a variant of peltier cooling to have drives chilled together off a single metal plate, then repeat a few times in a chassis. So in short, I can think of improvements but most would come at the cost of higher capex to do so, and that could negatively impact the $ / GB numbers that Backblaze is trying to keep down. Perhaps there's not much consideration for leasing datacenter real estate or power costs or something into the equations but without some reliable numbers it's all speculation to me.