I mentioned in a sister comment, I don't think I have ever gone over 50TB, so it's very much overkill, but it makes me feel cool. One advantage, though, is tha

I mentioned in a sister comment, I don't think I have ever gone over 50TB, so it's very much overkill, but it makes me feel cool. One advantage, though, is that when you have a "nearly-unlimited" place to dump data, it kind of changes how you think about problems. If I want to do some experiment with video encoding, there's really nothing stopping me from encoding a video into 100 different configurations so I can directly compare stuff. I don't have to be sparing, and there at least won't be any surprise bills from Amazon or Google later. They're spinning drives so I don't really worry about the write-cycle stuff.