If you prefer to own media instead of streaming it, are into photography, video editing, 3D modelling, any AI-related stuff (models add up) or are a digital hoarder/archivist you blow through storage rather quickly. I'm sure there are some other hobbies that routinely work with large file sizes.

Storage is cheap enough that rather than deleting 1000's of photos and never be able to reclaim or look at them again I'd rather buy another drive. I'd rather have a RAW of an 8 year old photo that I overlooked and decide I really like and want to edit/work with than a 87kb resized and compressed JPG of the same file. Same for a mostly-edited 240GB video file. What if I want or need to make some changes to it in the future? May as well hold onto it than have to re-edit the video or re-shoot the video if the original footage was also deleted.

Content creators have deleted their content often enough that if I enjoyed a video and think future me might enjoy rewatching the video - I download it rather than trust that I can still watch it in the future. Sites have been taken offline frequently enough that I download things. News sites keep restructuring and breaking all their old article links so I download the articles locally. JP artists are notorious for deleting their entire accounts and restarting under a new alias that I routinely archive entire Pixiv/Twitter accounts if I like their art as there is no guarantee it will still be there to enjoy the next day.

It all adds up and I'm approaching 2 million well-organized and (mostly) tagged media files in my Hydrus client [0]. I have many scripts to automate downloading and tagging content for these purposes. I very, very rarely delete things. My most frequent reason for deleting anything is "found in higher quality" which conceptually isn't really deleting.

Until storage costs become unreasonable I don't see my habits changing anytime soon. On the contrary - storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and new formats keep getting created to encode data more and more efficiently.

[0] https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html

This is a drop in the bucket for photographers, videographers, and general backups of RAW / high resolution videos from mobile devices. 80TB [usable] was "just enough" for my household in 2016.

It's still not enough to hold a local copy of sci-hub, but could probably hold quite a few recorded conference talks (or similar multimedia files) or a good selection of huggingface models.

For me I have about 35TB and growing in Unraid for Plex/Torrents/Backups/Docker

Especially since it's mostly turned off and it seems like the author is the only user

avoid giving disney money

Versioned datasets for machine learning.