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by earthscienceman 1038 days ago
This is bizarre to me. Cloud storage kills the need for small drives. So for the individual with modest storage needs, the cloud is relatively inexpensive and thought free. But the moment you get over 2TB the cloud gets extremely expensive. So if you're a person who needs to store a lot, large drives make a lot of sense.

This to me, it's the opposite of observably true. You would think large drives would be most in demand for personal use.
4 comments
WarOnPrivacy 1038 days ago
> Cloud storage kills the need for small drives.

I'm not sure that cloud storage kills anything. There's reasonable mistrust in it and much of the world lives with unreliable infrastructure..

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prmoustache 1038 days ago
Most people aren't able to self-host and maintain a more reliable infra for various reasons: lack of knowledge, lack of free time, they don't necessarily have 2 different houses, lazyness, etc.
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catchnear4321 1038 days ago
are you only asking/observing yourself and your tech-savvy friends?

cloud storage doesn’t make local storage irrelevant. just less relevant. drives still fail, new machines are built, etc, etc. and when that happens to the average consumer, they don’t seek out the biggest drive available. just whatever is down the street.

and just down the street doesn’t want to stock dozens of massive drives, lest the average consumers balk at the prices.

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flir 1038 days ago
The cloud isn't supplying storage, the cloud is providing reasons not to need storage in the first place (piracy vs streaming).
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haswell 1038 days ago
Cloud services are providing both things.

Most of the people in my life rely on cloud storage for their digital lives - mostly Google Drive or iCloud. It’s the primary destination for photos and videos for many people, and services like Google docs both store files and remove the need for traditional local storage.

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jzb 1037 days ago
Most people never stored their TV on their personal devices in the first place. People shifted from rental to streaming / DVD & Blu-Ray to streaming.

Every year I have more pictures and more documents and more stuff in general to store. That or I have to fuss with pruning things, which is a PITA and I'm reluctant to do.

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yjftsjthsd-h 1038 days ago
Naive question: Does the decline of smaller local storage undermine economies of scale that benefited larger local storage?
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