The thing with hard drives: if chia bombs, you can still turn around and sell them on Ebay. And when they're 14tb+ drives, they'll retain their value for a decent time.

you can't do that with miners, and GPU's are still fairly specific components. But plenty of companies and people have all sorts of needs for extra space.

I mean - if we're going to be scaling anything... hard drives are the thing. And if there are any storage optimizations people come up with, those will only benefit the storage industry overall; unlike ASIC miners, for example.