It's really not that hard.

If you're a photographer for example, storage gets filled up VERY VERY quickly. A wedding photographer may do 1000-6000 photos in a weekend, 40-100MB each; which is 40GB - 500GB per event, depending on your workflow.

Video even more so - whether it's an entertainment library, or high quality videos of family, let alone if you do it professionally or semi-pro.

Home labs for anything - virtualization, data science, ML, CI/CD, etc.

My current NAS has 8TB drives in it, but only because of the price curve. I would've preferred 12TB but 8TB is where the price/capacity/performance cusp seems right now.

Yep, I’m a photographer and I’ve got 4x8TB drives in a NAS and it takes some work to make sure it doesn’t fill up. I like to keep all my wedding raws for a year, and I keep all the raw files I haven’t culled long term.

interesting - what do you think of keeping the best photos on NAS and moving the rest to tape? LTO-8 is ~$10/TB retail and lasts for decades...

Tape also has other overhead... like you need a reader and if you’re operating at the scale where the cost of the tape is a deciding factor, then you probably also would like to have an auto loader, rack mounted gear, etc. Not to mention the different software needed and keeping track of what is on tape (which tape?), vs disk is a lot to manage.

For many, just keeping multiple HDDs around, even if they are slightly more expensive is the simpler option.

What's the actual cost of ownership? I have never found a drive + tapes system that made financial sense, but I'm willing to be shown the error of my GoogleFu ways :-)

Software engineer who deals with large datasets, disk images, etc etc. Throughout the years I've had to have a big "scratch disk" with yet another bigger "archive" to support my work.

For my scratch disks I need at least 1TB locally (preferred 4+), and for my archive I need 16TB easy. I deal with everything from shape files, to GIS, to huge flat-file processing etc etc. I'm the guy who can take 10+ years of data and make business sense of it so storage is a constant headache/need.

To get ahead of someone telling me, "you're doing it wrong": no. No I am not. Just because you don't have the need doesn't mean there's not a market for it.

I have something like 5TB of tv shows and movies on a Plex server since I hate swapping in DVDs and Blurays for the stuff I watch more than once and my collection isn't even really that big.

But anyone with a large video library could easily use up a ton of storage. I've filled up my external drive used for Plex, it's upgrade time for me and I'm going for a 4x8TB NAS and hopefully that'll keep me running for at least a few more years.

Very useful for storing medium/large-scale crawls. Common Crawl is 200TB+ per month (http://commoncrawl.org/connect/blog/). Uncompressed, if compressed it'd probably go through one such disk every 1-2 months. My own crawling operations consume about half a TB each month.

Storing high resolution (1080p/4K) videos is another big spacehog

Animation studios. I worked for one that produced content for Netflix and they were struggling with space issues. With just over 1PB of storage data, it gets tricky to fit more hardware.

You have to keep archival data in case the studio decides to comes back, not forgetting you have to keep revisions, the raw formats, the rendered formats, the render raws, audio raw, audio mixed.

Television Studio's and Broadcasting Companies all occupy lots storage too.

Archivists and people who enjoy large collections of data, who are providing a useful service to preserve internet history.

When I bought my first computer it had a 200MB hard disk drive. One of my former professors told me I was nuts, that I would never fill that much disk space.

2002 called and wants its argument back

Anybody who wants to run the latest CoD render pack.

Can't think of a single company that might want to store 18 TB on a single disk? These are enterprise-class products after all.

Working on a security solution right now and I can 100% tell you I can think of multiple companies that need an on-site 18TB datastore, even "small" companies. Also have worked with tons of creative agencies. Video, photo, etc all can take huge amounts of disk to safely store.

Sorry to disagree but your assumption that these are "enterprise-class" products is incorrect. There are lots of business needs that require large on-prem storage solutions without being an "enterprise-type" business.

Edit: downvotes? Really? I'd really love to see someone make a case against this.

>Sorry to disagree but your assumption that these are "enterprise-class" products is incorrect.

Well, it literally says Enterprise Class SATA HDD on the drives.

"enterprise class" is a standing term in HDDs for more expensive and more reliable drives, and literally what WD labels those drives. It doesn't mean "small companies never have workloads that need those" (although many might want to wait for cheaper disks of the same size), and the parent didn't suggest so. It seems a bit weird to complain that they worded their answer to restrictively for your liking, instead of just expanding with your experience with specific examples.

Even for home use, if you have a family who wants to keep local backups of multiple devices. A phone, laptop and tablet per person for even two people would eat through a few TBs every few years.

It's definitely a thing. Media is one use case, logging is another.