[pfarnsworth]

I guess my question is more about the long term implications of transfer speeds increasing much slower than hard drives space. And if there's a hidden risk to downtime because all of a sudden, a full rack of 32 or even 64TB drive will take day(s) to transfer as opposed to an hour or so because transfer speeds are so slow.

[pgeorgi]

There are implications. ZFS' raid-z2 (which uses 2 disks for redundancy data) was pitched - in 2008 or so - with the idea that disks are now large enough that recovery can take long enough that it's likely that another disk in the raid set breaks before the redundancy is back.

[andy4blaze]

I suppose if you had a single 32TB drive that went offline for say a week, and then once it came back online you'd have some type of pent up demand and a "slow" transfer speed. Storage systems in general spread the load across multiple devices so the effect of slow transfer speed is near zero in most backup and archiving applications and maybe more problematic in transactional applications.