A big thing they are saying in the paper is that they want to see data center HDDs that care slightly less about their medium error rates and opt to give better

A big thing they are saying in the paper is that they want to see data center HDDs that care slightly less about their medium error rates and opt to give better areal density and more consistent tail latencies and let the system above it to handle the reliability as it needs to do anyway. I've been thinking like this for a while and would tend to reduce the ERC (Error Recovery Control) to a minimum but the disks are still not designed to have these at very low numbers and Google has several interesting ideas in their paper along these lines. It would be really awesome if they get the HDD makers to go along with this.