I, for one, believe what you are saying. There have been murmurs for several years that big outfits like Dropbox/Amazon/Google have moved to use some very fancy

I, for one, believe what you are saying. There have been murmurs for several years that big outfits like Dropbox/Amazon/Google have moved to use some very fancy storage tech. Just to ponder on the available confirmed info - lets add Samsungs 16TB SSD to a 48 disk 1U rack and times that by 4... I'd say just with a lot of cash and stuff you can buy now you can pass that order of magnitude pretty easily. If you make your own...I can easily see the densities knocking Blackblaze's pod out of the water. As for costs, well massive ordering, preferred rates, custom designs and symbiotic relationships with manufacturers, coupled with a software architecture that complements all these hardware gains could conceivably bring costs down to levels unheard of outside of the big cloud service providers. The conditions and technology available right now make what you are saying within the realms of the 'adjacent possible' if you have enough money to throw at the problem. With the kind of clout Dropbox et al have I can well believe you're getting incredible storage densities but at incredible knock down prices.