Technology

This hard drive is so big when it backs up it makes a beeping sound.

Not necessarily.

The trouble with spinning platters this big is that if a drive fails, it will take a long time to rebuild the array after shoving a new one in there. Sysadmins will be nervous about another failure taking out the whole array until that process is complete, and that can take days. There was some debate a while back on if the industry even wanted spinning platters >20TB. Some are willing to give up density if it means less worry.

I guess Seagate decided to go ahead, anyway, but the industry may be reluctant to buy this.

That's a use-case for a fuckton of total capacity, but not necessarily a fuckton of per-drive capacity. I think what the grandparent comment is really trying to say is that the capacity has so vastly outstripped mechanical-disk data transfer speed that it's hard to actually make use of it all.

For example, let's say you have these running in a RAID 5 array, and one of the drives fails and you have to swap it out. At 190MB/s max sustained transfer rate (figure for a 28TB Seagate Exos; I assume this new one is similar), you're talking about over two days just to copy over the parity information and get the array out of degraded mode! At some point these big drives stop being suitable for that use-case just because the vulnerability window is so large that the risk of a second drive failure causing data loss is too great.