I deal with large data chunks and 40TB drives are an interesting idea.... until you consider one failing

raids and arrays for these large data sets still makes more sense then all the eggs in smaller baskets

You'd still put the 40TB drives in a raid? But eventually you'll be limited by the number of bays, so larger size is better.

I guess the idea is you'd still do that, but have more data in each array. It does raise the risk of losing a lot of data, but that can be mitigated by sensible RAID design and backups. And then you save power for the same amount of storage.

Or the 8k photos of vacation dinners.

They're also ignoring how many times this conversation has been had...

We never stopped raid at any other increase in drive density, there's no reason to pick this as the time to stop.

Cost. The speed of flash storage is an inherent quality and not something manufacturers are selecting for typically. I assure you if they knew how to make some sort of Super MLC they absolutely would.

i remember bragging when my computer had 40gb storage

So all the other hard drives will be cheaper now, right? Right?

It used to be pertinent to check the color of WD drives. I can't remember all of them but of the top of my head I remember Blue dying the most. They used to have black, red and maybe a green model, now they have purple and gold as well. Each was designated for certain purposes / reliability.

Source: Used to be a certified Apple/Dell/HP repair tech, so I was replacing hard drives daily.

I bought my first HDD second hand. It was advertised as 40MB. But it was 120MB. How happy was young me?

Gold is the enterprise ones. Black is enthusiast, blue is desktop, red is NAS, purple is NVR, green is external. Green you almost certainly don't want (they do their own power management), red is likely to be SMR. But otherwise they're not too different. If you saw a lot of blues failing, it's probably because the systems you supported used blue almost exclusively.

Of course, because you don't want to lose the data if one of the drives dies. And backing up that much data is painful.

Any disk can and will fail at some point in time. Backup is your best friend. Some sort of disk redundancy is your second best friend.

It's not inherent in terms of "more store=more fast".

You could absolutely take older, more established production nodes to produce higher quality, longer lasting flash storage. The limitation hardly ever is space, but heat. So putting that kind of flash storage, with intentionally slowed down controllers, into regular 2.5 or even 3.5" form factors should be possible.

Cost could be an issue because the market isn't seen as very large.

Raid 5 is becoming less viable due to the increasing rebuild times, necessitating raid 1 instead. But new drives have better iops too so maybe not as severe as predicted.

they make bulk storage ssds with QLC for enterprise use.

The reason why they're not used for consumer use cases yet is because raw nand chips are still more expensive than hard drives. People dont want to pay $3k for a 50tb SSD if they can buy a $500 50tb hdd and they don't need the speed.

For what it's worth, 8tb TLC pcie3 U.2 SSDs are only $400 used on ebay these days which is a pretty good option if you're trying to move away from noisy slow hdds. 4 of those in raid 5 plus a diy nas would get you 24tb of formatted super fast nextcloud/immich storage for ~$2k.

I thought green was "eco." At least the higher-end external ones tend to be red drives, which is famously why people shuck them to use internally because they're often cheaper than just buying a red bare drive directly, for some reason.

A 2tb SSD can now be bought for 100$ at least.

The main issue I see is that the gulf between capacity and transfer speed is now so vast with mechanical drives that restoring the array after drive failure and replacement is unreasonably long. I feel like you'd need at least two parity drives, not just one, because letting the array be in a degraded state for multiple days while waiting for the data to finish copying back over would be an unacceptable risk.

You might be right. Although I think it's been pretty hit or miss with which drives they use in those enclosures.