WD announces 44TB external drive enclosure

The announcement says it is Windows and MacOS compatible, but doesn't say if it comes pre-formatted with a file system or which FS that would be.

At an average file size of 100KB, this device would hold nearly half a billion files. If the FS is NTFS then that many files would make about 2TB just for the file table. Just finding a file you were looking for could need an enormous amount of data to be read from disk (let alone trying to cache the table in memory). Anyone else see this as a major problem?

Other FS (e.g. Ext4) have a smaller entry for each file in their file table, but with half a billion files it is still a lot of data.

A tiered storage tower with speedy response at top and bit durability/longevity at bottom, unchanging data drifts to settle and fossilize on the bottom would be a key selling point in the market. Sticker claims 15, 30 or 60 year bit life.

Contains two 22TB hard disk drives.