Well since I’m on the defending side of that (full disclosure: I’m a Cloudflare partner, helped with the early stages of their loadbalancers, before they were offered to the public), when a significant attack happens, a lot of alarm bells start going off. The “victim” starts notifying upstream providers of the attackers. Since that amount of traffic (ie the infamous 2.5Tbps attack targetting Google) doesn’t go unnoticed long, the ISPs have a vested interest in stopping it as soon as possible. Let’s take the SEA-ME-WE3 cable for example (full disclosure again: worked for one of the 92 owners of that cable). That cable, which is the longest underwater cable in the world as far as I know, has an online capacity of 2.3Tbps. It’s very likely half of the world (Australia to UK) would notice it if it suddenly became saturated.
The attacker’s upstream see the notices on their abuse@ email (they are technically forced to act upon them, except some “attacker friendly” ISPs) and they put the IPs on monitoring. As soon as they are convinced that there is indeed an attack, they cut them off. The victim can null-route IPs on its end to keep the servers online in the meantime.
Back to storj: the incoming data per second isn’t the problem. The packets per second are. If we are talking about that much traffic, it’s more likely routers would start crashing left and right, long before any drive reliability issues come into play. This is a valid concern. Worrying about drives failing because they store TTL data isn’t.
The Storj Drives (see previous reply) have a 550TBW/year and 2.5M hours of MTBF. Taking everything to face value, that means if you write 550TB per year, that drive should last for 285 years. As you can see, those are statistical “guidelines”. It doesn’t mean that if you write 551TB in a year, the drive will fail immediately.
Besides that, everyone (on the “OMG TTL IS DEATH!” camp) seems to think that as soon as the new client signs, all existing data will be immediately converted to TTL data and no other data types will ever be uploaded. There will be normal data (ie data uploaded and deleted at a random future interval by the client), forever data (never to be deleted as long as the account is paid for), low TTL data (I’m guessing nothing less than a week), medium TTL data (30 days), and long-term TTL data (3 months). Do I have any proof of this? No, but I can confidently say that others will use the network as they have been using it so far.
You shouldn’t. You should sell your payout the moment you receive it. This isn’t an investment.