[throw0101a]

> Hyperscalars use a blend of storage flavours covering the whole spectrum

Probably including taping, which most non-enterprise folks are often surprised still exists.

There's an upfront cost for the infrastructure (drives, usually robotic libraries), but once you get to certain volumes they're quite handy because of the automation that can occur.

[EricBurnett]

Tapes are awkward though, since they can't directly satisfy the same random-access use-cases. E.g. even GCS's 'Archive' storage class, for the coldest of the cold, offers sub-second retrieval, so there's at least one copy on HDD or similar at any time.

Tapes are suitable for tape-oriented async-retrieval products (not sure if any Clouds have one?), or for putting _some_ replicas of data on as an implementation detail if the TCO is lower than achieving replication/durability guaranteed from HDD alone. But that still puts a floor on the non-tape cold bytes, where this sort of drive might help.