Why Your Object Storage Is Slow (And How Parallelism Over HDDs Fixes It)

Large-scale object storage systems face the challenge of achieving petabyte-per-second throughput from HDDs limited to ~200 MB/s each, compounded by seek time penalties, constant drive failures, and complex request routing. Erasure coding replaces triple replication to reduce storage overhead from 200% to ~37%, while splitting data across many drives enables parallel reads that actually improve latency rather than worsening it.