[djackson]

> and a greater challenge for SSDs trying to catch up with the amount of storage on offer.

This technology is pretty much exclusively for backups, no? Not really the competitive space for SSDs. With only a single read/write head and 18TB of information on a drive, you're looking at an enormous performance bottleneck.

[VladRussian]

increasing plate density has been the primary driver of the increased stream performance of the HDDs - with the same rotation speed the more dense plate results in the more bits to fly under the head. Random IO of course is a different beast. Though is you look at the data filling the disks - like movies - it is more about stream not random.