It’s about density in a datacenter. With this you have 1PB in 4 drives, fitting in a 1u rack, which is just incredible. Also these drives don’t use regular SATA or SAS, they use PCIe, so these drives are also quite fast in comparison. Density has a power efficiency aspect as well both in just having fewer drives and requiring fewer servers to put drives into.
A 42U rack filled with 1u servers with 8 drives each, will have 84PB of data. It feels like it was a few month ago where you could buy a rack with 1PB of storage, and that was awesome. Not anymore.
You’re actually right, it’s just that datacenters like density and will gladly split your data onto hundreds of these little amazing magical bits of technology rather than hundreds of less magical ones in the same physical volume.
DENSITY. Hyperscalers want to store as much data per rack and per data center as possible. They will eventually have hundreds of thousands of these drives.