When I was at FNAL on the USCMS data team, we were able to take data from the LHC at ~40Gbps over an optical link and write it out just fine to spinning disk (which would hold it until we could shove it out onto thousands of LTO4 tapes).

I don't think there are going to be a ton of applications for this hardware, but it'll be great for those edge cases where you absolutely need that sort of data rate.