I have a few 960GB (ish? can’t remember exact size) 2.5in at work that are almost useless.

Requires an additional 45 clear to accommodate the update file and is currently sitting at 196.5. Deleting Hitman and queuing it up after the update is simple enough technically for someone like me with a wired high speed connection and no data cap, but still a pain in the ass and way too big for a single game.

I haven’t played much since my curved monitor got broken but between Stellaris and Rimworld I don’t know if there’s enough time in a day for another build queue. I’ll check it out at some point and fall into the rabbit hole I’m sure.

i can finally seed every spn season

For my wallets

That's extra.

Clean up assets, are you kidding? Gamers have enough disk and time is money! /s

Of it's raid6 it's 320tb or so.

We seem to be headed in that direction though. My most recent motherboard has built in LEDs for no practical reason other than "ooh shiny". Took me a minute to find the UEFI setting to disable that. "Stealth mode" apparently.

It's also increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find wired mice, keyboards and headsets in that ever-increasing gulf between "all singing, all dancing, expensive gaming device full of unnecessary LEDs" and "cheap, awful, bare minimum". If it plugs in and there's a 5v rail nearby, gotta draw on that to be shiny! Anything else would be sacrilege!

The image is literally just the proprietary xbox drive plugged into an xbox

Yeah, why aren't there any?

Same. Between work and home, I've had ~30 Seagate drives fail after less than a year. I stopped buying them for personal use many years ago, but work still insists, because they're cheaper. I have 1TB WD Black drives that are over ten years old and still running. My newest WD Black drive is a 6TB, and I've had it for seven years. I dunno if WD Black is still good, but that's the first one I'll try if I need a new drive.

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Because with someone else's node, they can potentially track and log the transactions you make

yeah i still use hard drives for storing movies, logs, and backups on my Nas cluster, but using it for nextcloud or remote game storage is too slow. I also live in an apartment and the scrubs are too loud. There's only a 5:1 price premium, so it's worth just going all flash unless you have like 30tb storage needs.

tbf all the big storage clusters use either mirroring or erasure coding these days. For bulk storage, 4+2 or 8+2 erasure coding is pretty fast, but for databases you should always use mirroring to speed up small writes. but yeah for home use, just use LVM or zfs mirrors.

Aren't a lot of the 2.5" ones already empty space?

How big, and how expensive, would a 3.5" SSD be, if it actually filled enough of the space with NAND chips for the form factor to be warranted?

Games can't really compress their assets much.

Stuff like textures generally use a lossless bitmap format. The compression artefacts you get with lossy formats, while unnoticable to the human eye, can cause much more visible rendering artefacts once the game engine goes to calculate how light should interact with the material.

That's not to say devs couldn't be more efficient, but it does explain why games don't really compress that well.

And they’d only be like $5k each. HDD prices have gone ridiculous. I’d just like 20TB drives to be reasonably priced. 10TB drives are twice the price they were 5 years ago.

When I say "compress" I mean downscale. I'm suggesting they could have dozens of copies of each texture and model in a host of different resolutions (number of polygons, pixels for textures, etc), instead of handling that in the code. I'm not exactly sure how they currently do low vs medium vs high settings, just suggesting that they could solve that using a ton more data if they essentially had no limitations in terms of customer storage space.