On: Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the T...

[revelation]

If thats the access pattern, couldn't they just use tape? Of course you can't easily bootstrap an automated warehouse for these things, but once you have it, you enjoy the drastically lower prices and better availability of tape.

(I know nothing about using tapes to seriously store data, so this is conjecture.)

[toomuchtodo → revelation]

Having a tape libarary/silo is much harder to scale vs building pods of hard drives.

Experience: I helped route and process data for the Large Hadron's CMS detector.