[danielbarla]

That's an interesting point, though I suspect it's slightly overstated. I'm sure there's several scenarios that demand huge amounts of storage - e.g. storing HD series, etc - but I'd argue that it isn't mainstream in the greater scheme of things. Heck, I have a 2mbit ADSL line (since I'm living in the arse end of nowhere), and my primary PC has 3x250GB spinnies and a 100GB SSD, no cloud storage. I have a 2TB external for long-term backups. I haven't bothered to replace the HDDs, because honestly I don't really need to. And I'm sure I'm not a special case.

[creshal]

> I'm sure there's several scenarios that demand huge amounts of storage - e.g. storing HD series, etc - but I'd argue that it isn't mainstream in the greater scheme of things.

That was my point; almost nobody is storing HD series anymore because people want to (and in many cases legally are only able to) stream them instead.

[ajuc]

> almost nobody is storing HD series anymore

They never were. Why would you store a movie on a hard drive after you watched it?

[greedo]

Lots of people use Plex etc for movie playback. Kids love to rewatch movies, as do some movie lovers. I have a copy of many movies in a disk array so that I can watch them anywhere in the house without digging out a disk.

[saiya-jin]

I do store movies, and quite a few people around me too. I store only truly remarkable and important ones to me that I might watch later (and often I do), currently filling most of my 3 TB drive. I never go back to series, even the best ones are one-time watch for me.

Flac music can fill another 500 GB easily, more depending what you listen to..

Not a lot of people know how/can stream a properly good 1080p stream with high bitrates. oh, you want some subtitles because you're not an english native? Or you have fancy stereo/surround setup that you want to actually use? oh well, you better download some bigger version.