These are fantastic for long-term storage of something that may need to be retrieved at a moments notice, but is rarely accessed.

One example from a previous job, these in a Ceph cluster as an origin for a CDN delivering video. We transcode the video to various bit rates and chunk em, then clients request them through CDN, there is not a lot of writing, with some reads when the asset is new, but once it is cached it just basically sits and is idle.

Larger capacity meant we could store more data in a single rack, our limitation for the origin wasn't CPU or bandwidth throughput, it was literally our storage that forced us to keep expanding.

The deployment I did was using 8TB drives. We used HGST with their Helium because of the lesser power draw, allowing us to install more servers in a rack without going over our maximum power draw and heat density for cooling.