[bastawhiz]

But if you need 1eb, waiting a whole month for it isn't great. You'd be better off with 720 1pb devices taking an hour in parallel.

[Dylan16807]

Yes it causes problems in this increasingly narrow situation.

Massive storage that takes a month to fully read is acceptable in a wide variety of use cases. If it's cheaper than hard drives it'll get a huge amount of users.

[londons_explore]

It's notable that 'time to read/write entire device' has been creeping up for any storage device you can buy off the shelf for the past ~40 years.

Reading a floppy disk took around 30 secs for example. A whole CD took 5 mins. My whole 1TB SSD takes 10 mins.

[rcxdude]

A modern hard drive (36TB @ 280MB/s) can take more than a day. If you treat a bank of tapes as one device this can get even more extreme.

[Liftyee]

Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.

Perhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)

[herodoturtle]

In long term archival use cases this is less of an issue. Especially if it’s many exabytes we’re talking about, needing to be stored for decades.

But I 100% agree with your main point about possibility vs productionisation.