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Why do we need a distributed system when our storage is just 15TB?

Hi, sorry if it has a pretty straightforward answer. I am a beginner in system designing.
I really can’t seem to understand that if our storage is just 15 TB and memory for cache (which I assume is Main Memory) is 170 GB, then why do we need a distributed system?
Can’t all this be handled by one machine?

Thanks!

Hello @Drake ,
There are many reasons for choosing a distributed system, but the most important would be accessibility and safety. If you have one server it will have a lot of requests, and so the answers to those requests would start to lag. In addition to this if you have one server and it goes down your entire system shuts down but with distributed systems, you will have more servers that can handle the requests until the other server comes back up.
Hope this helps.