> Never in a million years would I trust that much data to mechanical hard drive. Impressive feat, but no thank you.
This is why god invented RAID (for localised HDD failures) and backups (for filesystem level issues - RAID won't help you there - or disasters that fry the entire chassis/room).
I currently have a ~50TB RAID6 array (thats grown over time from like 2TB 20 years ago with the addition of additional HDDs and/or replacing smaller drives with bigger drives) and have had a half dozen HDD failures over that span and not lost a single bit. I've come close, I'll tell you, but close isn't a loss in this case ;)
I do have (intermittent) backups as well, but haven't needed to use them to recover from HDD failures due to the RAID array surviving those failures.
While I don't (obviously!) have 30TB HDD, I could see upgrading to them in 10 years if other storage tech hasn't replaced it on a holistic $/GB + reliability/performance basis by then. Which, TBH, I am hoping for ;)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
