[natch]

I'm a coder, not a designer. I build corpora for natural language processing use. In the last 24 hours I downloaded 62GB of web pages for textual analysis. That represents about 10% of what I plan to download for this one project, but I just hit the pause button on the downloading so I could avoid hitting my home internet provider's monthly data cap. I have probably spent about a solid week in coding time on this, or a few weeks of tinkering time. A point I mention to highlight the fact that this is just one project... I do other things on top of this. This one is English only. There are maybe 50 or so common other languages that I've done at various scales. So yes, disk space is useful. Obviously I don't need all data for all projects loaded locally at once. But working with this scale of data on a cloud drive isn't really a great option, so some off-machine local storage is better, and on-machine local storage for any data that is being processed right now.

You say nothing "fun" but this is fun for me... I think work is allowed to be fun. It's not a day job at the moment, more of a hobby, but it relates to some day jobs I've had and would like to have, and gives me data I can play with to keep my skills up. It's valuable (production quality) data when processed, so it's not mere entertainment.