So, the 8TB drives are fine if you're doing sequential writes, mainly doing write-only workloads, or have a massive buffer in front.

In my experience, the PCIE drives they mention (the DC P3700) are incredible. They're blazing fast (though the 3D X-Point stuff is obviously faster), have big supercaps (in case of power failure), and really low latency for an SSD (150 microseconds or so). They're a pretty suitable alternative to in-memory logbuffers where latency is less crucial. Much cheaper than the equivalent memory too. Having a few of these in front of a RAID 10 made up of 8TB drives will work just fine.

FWIW your experience with a RAID 6 of big disks is unsurprising. Raid 6 is almost always a bad choice nowadays since disks are so big. Terrible recovery times and middling performance.