I've been working on personal and professional projects where growth isn't a truly restricting constraint but is still an actual constraint. What do you mean by

I've been working on personal and professional projects where growth isn't a truly restricting constraint but is still an actual constraint. What do you mean by "meaningful"? Once I get into the 10's of terabytes there's no storage system where copying a TiB of data is "instant" or ignorable. Professionaly I work on a financial reporting system where there are around 1.5 million accounts with trading activity. Things like moving a month of data around and checksumming still take on the order of 1 hour. If the size of that monthly dataset doubled, we'd be OKAY but it it grew 10x we'd have to start restructuring things both on the software side and the hardware side. For personal work I am working with searching video frame substrings regardless of codec, resolution etc within videos in a ~50 TiB video set. Having to re-encode hundrends of GiB of video at a time is some thing that takes a huge amount of time and nothing something I can just "throw into an S3 bucket". The growth of said working set is not truly constrained but is actually constrained. I can only afford so many 8-10 TiB HDDs at a time! They also fail and have to be mirrored/backedup with rsycn at the very least which adds to the cost for me.