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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

> And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.

Not surprising, considering the vast majority of consumers don't need more storage than you can easily fit in an M.2 form factor. Why mess around with expensive enterprise U.2 drives when it gives you zero benefit and gains you the hassle of dealing with extra wires and finding space for an ugly bulky rectangle?

Once you get to storage sizes where 2.5" becomes a need, you are well beyond the consumer price range. Very few people are willing to spend more on a single SSD than on the rest of their gaming computer combined.

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With individual games being hundreds of gigabytes and growing, I'm not convinced that you're right.

The "vast majority of consumers" are not PC gamers who keep a dozen AAA games installed at a time. They have work PCs and laptops.

I never said that the vast majority of people need large SSDs.

I said that the set of people who need large SSDs is big enough such that its complement does not necessarily constitute the "vast majority".

Obviously what you mean by "vast majority" is somewhat subjective, and there is absolutely room to disagree with my statement. But argue against the right thing.

4TB is what currently fits easily into the M.2 form factor, and 8TB has been possible for years without much extra expense in custom packaging. I'm quite confident that it is fair to say the "vast majority" of consumers do not need 8TB or more of storage in their laptops.

If local storage becomes too cheap, how can companies push their cloud storage subscriptions? Imho it’s sad that ssds haven’t gotten much bigger. A spinning disk can now house dozens of tb. If 8tb can fit on an m.2, it could feasibly fit even more into an SSD form factor. Not as fast as nvme, but still faster and somewhat more resilient than hdds. I have a strong desire for ssds like this… but my only option is super expensive u.2, and I don’t need it to be that crazy fast. Just faster and smaller than hdd would suffice

It pains me so much. I would love a laptop with a 4TB or 8TB SSD. But the 3.5 extra TB to go from a 0.5TB SSD to a 4TB SSD costs 1758 USD if I want an Apple laptop (which I do, for all sorts of other reasons). It's absolutely wild.

If you're worried about price and pricing Apple, you're doing it wrong. You could put the SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure and it'll be just about as fast, if a little awkward to carry around and plug in often.

There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility. Hell, I don't like Dell for their price points, but all of the laptops I've seen from them have upgradeable RAM and storage. If you want even more customization there are things like Framework.

Well, I am worried about doubling the price of the laptop for 3.5TB. External SSDs are a significant extra and (technologically) completely unnecessary complexity and inconvenience.

> There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility.

I disagree. The laptop market is tragic.

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