&gt; I wonder if there will be 100TB spinning read&#x2F;write drives by 2020, an exponential leap instead of incremental<p>The problem with spinning disks is that speed and reliability has not increased in line with capacity. There comes a point at which it doesn&#x27;t make sense to make them any bigger (capacity-wise).<p>Just creating a filesystem on an 8TB disk takes hours. If you bring in disk (block level) encryption and the requirement to fill the disk with random data and then encrypt before creating the filesystem, you&#x27;re looking at a multi-day task. Expanded to 100TB, you could be looking at a month just to bring a disk online.<p>On the reliability front - a spinning 8TB disk is probably about as reliable as a 1TB disk, so that means you have a 8x increase in probability of data loss, as well as ~ 8x more data to recover&#x2F;re-distribute for every failure