I work on such a system and one of the things we do is figure out which of that sensor data to throw away. In most cases the change between measures is too small to be worth saving, and because we have less data saved we can analyse it faster and thus do something useful with it. The purposes of all that data isn't to fill storage, it is to allow making useful decisions based on it. If you can't make a better decision based on sensor input then don't save it.
Other than Facebook who has 2 billion rows for every person the planet (tongue in cheek).