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5TB is not that large and it's not that difficult to get good performance. We operated a 50TB single instance of MySQL for 5 years with a tiny team before migrating to Vitess, and it was basically zero maintenance. We did partition our largest table, which just requires a little extra SQL, but is otherwise transparent.

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You guys are talking past each other, as your workloads appear to be different. With a traditional RDBMS, size usually wouldn't be a bottleneck, as long as you can add enough disks to a single server.

Write operations per second, that's the metric I would care about. A 50TB instance with low amount of write operations can be zero maintenance, while a 500GB instance with high amount of write operations can be a real pain.

Thank you for validating my troubles with a write-heavy ~500GB db in the midst of a TB-measuring contest :)

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