[onychomys]

I do digital histology, and our (research) lab currently has 204TB of image files. They live in a data center, of course, but if my institution decided to spin us off as a company or something and we needed to move the data, it'd be way faster to download it to disk and upload it in the destination center. I'm not really sure we'd do it with just one giant drive instead of a whole lot of 1TB ones, but who knows.

(I'm currently working on sending 100TB of images to some colleagues at the NIH for a study, we're doing it about 500GB a night for the next year or however long it'll take just because there's no hurry on the data, so it's not just some academic thought exercise!)

[yread]

Exactly, we just gobble up all the storage there is. In diagnostics it's easily 250GB per patient just for HEs. And if stuff like CODEX or light-sheet (or some other 3D) microscopy become common place even these drives won't be enough.

[fortysixdegrees]

That's just 5 20tb drives. Some cloud providers will copy it on to them if you send them in, and usually cheaper than the bandwidth cost. Same for ingress