Question: I’m not sure I quite understand. Like I get that they’re really expensive, but why aren’t these in mass production over much larger 2.5″/3.5″/M.2 drives?

1 TB in the size of a fingernail over hand-sized drives. I’m so confused. You could literally stack 100 of those little guys in the same space as one standard SSD.

Edit: Forgot the image:

http://imgur.com/trzmei5

Answer:

Might be best to just keep up with the times and regularly backup even archival data with current tech. Thanks for the help everyone.

Exactly.
I have data that originally existed on 5.25″ and 3.5″ floppies, from the late 80’s, early 90’s.
Pictures from my first digital camera (1998) that saved on a SmartMedia drive. I have a USB adapter for those cards, but I would not count on data saved from 20 years ago to still be readable.

They currently live in a NAS box with 50TB of online storage, and a SSD system drive that is thousands of times faster than the original system and drives that data lived on.

Why should I try to keep a 5.25″ floppy drive around?