Little demand seen for disks of over 16TB - too much to lose in one go

At the Data Centre World conference in London, AnandTech spoke to various industry experts and got to hear that enterprises aren't keen on adopting storage disks with a capacity of over 16TB. Apparently, storage customers that need high density are starting to discuss limits on drive size requirements based on their implementation needs.

Companies are looking at managing risks with disk size, and it appears 16TB is about the highest most companies want to go, regardless of how often the data is accessed, or how well a storage array has extra failover metrics:

Ultimately the size of the drive and the failure rate leads to element of risks and downtime, and aside from engineering more reliant drives, the other variable for risk management is drive size. 16TB, based on the conversations I’ve had today, seems to be that inflection point; no-one wants to lose 16TB of data in one go, regardless of how often it is accessed, or how well a storage array has additional failover metrics.

I was told that sure, drives above 16TB do exist in the market, however aside from niche applications (such as risk is an acceptable factor for higher density), volumes are low. This inflection point, one would imagine, is subject to change based on how the nature of data and data analytics will change over time.