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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

There is no consumer market for 4TB+ SSDs. There never was, and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future. Most non-technical people have been conditioned to store their data on their phones and/or in the cloud these days. When they need more storage, their first thought is to upgrade their cloud plan, not to open up their device and void the warranty.

Professionals like us know of course that the SSD is an easily upgradable component. But we also tend to know how to set up a NAS with 4x 18TB HDDs in a zfs pool that can saturate the bandwidth of any reasonable home network when transferring large files. So the market for professionals and enthusiasts don't always translate into a market for large SSDs.

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I would like to be able to get rid of my hard drive NAS at some point, in favour of something smaller and quieter. The price really doesn’t make sense right now, though.

Opening up one's device does not void the warranty in the US. We have the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act which forbids this, despite manufactures trying to groom us otherwise with those void if removed or broken stickers.

Most recently, FTC started to raise awareness and crack down on some abuse: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/....

Will take a long time to de-program and by that time nothing will be replaceable to matter due to industries march towards preventing repair altogether.

> and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future.

There might be if we get to vert large models that rely more on storage than compute, but that's a lot of "ifs" in there. Maybe when people start capturing their birthdays in 16K HDR at 120 fps.

> There is no consumer market for 4TB+ SSDs. There never was, and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future.

Gamers certainly are a market. Borderlands 3 for example, a 2019 game, clocks in at 75GB on Steam, GTA 5 at 105 GB, MSFS 150 GB. And that's all OLD games. CoD Black Ops wants 175 GB, GTA 6 is rumored to want anything from 100 to 300 GB. You don't want that on spinning rust.

Are you going to have all those installed at the same time? I mean, most players will focus on one, two games at the time, and also Steam or GoG will just backup your saved games to the cloud, so you can uninstall them, and come back to your old games later.

And if uninstalling is too far, inactive games can go to an extra cheap hard drive and it'll only take 10-15 minutes to move 100GB back to your SSD.

I was hoping SSDs would get price competitive with hard drives but the progress sure has been bad lately...

(It's possible to even set up a system that lets you play a game while it's being moved over to SSD, but sadly there aren't any easy ways to do that right now.)

> have been conditioned to store their data on their phones

This is 100% true. I have a family member that literally has a decade of family photos stored in WhatsApp conversations. 10 gigs app storage used on some old iPhone, no backup.

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