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Merklemap runs a 16TB PostgreSQL. Interesting thread on Hacker News where Pierre Barre describes the database architecture behind Merklemap, a certificate transparency search engine.

I run a 100 billion+ rows Postgres database [0], that is around 16TB, it's pretty painless!

There are a few tricks that make it run well (PostgreSQL compiled with a non-standard block size, ZFS, careful VACUUM planning). But nothing too out of the ordinary.

ATM, I insert about 150,000 rows a second, run 40,000 transactions a second, and read 4 million rows a second.

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It's self-hosted on bare metal, with standby replication, normal settings, nothing "weird" there.

6 NVMe drives in raidz-1, 1024GB of memory, a 96 core AMD EPYC cpu.

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About 28K euros of hardware per replica [one-time cost] IIRC + [ongoing] colo costs.