You might be surprised at how much of hyperscalers' data is really cold, and also has very weak access-time requirements. For every user-visible gigabyte, there

You might be surprised at how much of hyperscalers' data is really cold, and also has very weak access-time requirements. For every user-visible gigabyte, there are many gigabytes of secondary data like old logs or analytics datasets that are highly unlikely to be accessed ever again - and if they are, waiting minutes for them to be loaded is OK. And the trend is accelerating since the days when Facebook kept the entire Blu-Ray market afloat to deal with the deluge. I think there's quite significant appeal in the hyperscale/HPC markets for super high capacity disks, even if they're really slow (so long as they're not slower than tape). Background: I used to work on a very large storage system at Facebook, though the one most relevant to this discussion belonged to our sibling group. I've also missed any developments in the year-plus since I retired.