Hacker News Reader

Comment by httpz | Hacker News Reader

I think with the rise of streaming and cloud storage, the need for large storage devices on a personal level is really declining for most people.

View on HN

I think with the pricing of cloud storage and photo, video and assets taking more and more space, the opposite is true.

For example apple requires larger storage to even use prores:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212832

Or Baldur's gate 3 takes 123GB of storage for the install.

People swallow the cost because it is easier than migrating. My partner has made a lot of albums, tagging in google photos extensively. When her account reaches the free limit, I offered her to use google takeout and host her pictures in a local nextcloud instance but told her I didn't had immediate time to dig out if getting back tags and albums from google tameout's metadata was possible and she just grabbed her card details and subscribed to the drive expansion.

Gamers are an exception, but gaming is a niche market. Most people using computers are using laptops with integrated intel gpu and never install any game.

> For example apple requires larger storage to even use prores:

I don't think this is about capacity, but rather it's about performance: small SSDs are slower because they have fewer flash chips to write to in parallel. But that effect goes away as you move up to higher capacities and hit other bottlenecks; even high-end PCIe gen5 SSDs that are too power-hungry for anything other than desktops and servers reach full speed by 2TB.

Well, you wouldn't normally try to put a 123GB game on Google drive.

Alternatively, with the ever increasing exploiting of online providers, and the ongoing government led attacks on secure encryption, then maybe personal/local storage will turn out to be the smarter option after all. ;)

Dont get lulled into a false sense of privacy, the governments can and will hack anything connected to the Internet, sometimes illegally for trivial or whimsical reasons.

True and probably why Apple sells laptops with such ridiculously low storage of 256MB or charges insane amounts for reasonable amounts - because they want to force you into reliance on their services. But this penny pinching policy does cause major problems eg my daughters system files have taken up 90% of her SSD - so now she can no longer upgrade or install new software.

Why the downvotes? This is observably true “for most people”

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.

Naive question: Does the decline of smaller local storage undermine economies of scale that benefited larger local storage?

> 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..

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.

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.

The cloud isn't supplying storage, the cloud is providing reasons not to need storage in the first place (piracy vs streaming).

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.

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.

I only use cloud storage as a convenience / easy backup, not as "permanent" storage. My need for large storage devices hasn't really declined, it's pretty much crept up year by year.

Also - it starts getting very spendy for cloud storage after a few TB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com