The numbers are always mind-boggling to me. The precision, speed and reliability, all in a cheap mass-produced object. I suppose when you compare it to the chips themselves, those are also amazing. But HDDs just seem like they should be impossible.
Bought some 26TB HAMR drives recently. It uses solid state lasers to heat up the drive before writing. I shucked them from some Seagate external drive enclosures so we'll see how long my data will last. They're so new there's no failure data on them
I remember when I bought my first hard drive. It held 20MB and I was sure I’d never fill it.