And they get incredibly affordable. I bought a 512 GB microSD card for my Steam Deck a year ago for 38€.

Although I guess a 1 TB card would still cost me a whopping 108€.

They're affordable, but also not all that reliable. I can't even begin to count how many I've had fail on me over the years.

I had a 1TB card fail on me, but that only meant that the card would no longer accept writes. I could still read everything off it. Since I was using the card to carry my entire music collection in FLAC on my phone, I was pretty OK with that. Eventually, when I wanted to update that copy of my music collection, I easily replaced the card under warranty.

I was thinking similarly. Do I really want to rely upon 2TB being stored in a SD card? Numerous failures over the year, and only consider them for temporary storage.

How long does it even take to fill the drive?

It depends on what you store and your backup strategy. You rarely have 2TB of really precious data on a microSD.

microSD are meant to easily store a local copy of your data, not to be a reliable long term storage.

You can also use it to store useful but not unique data like games on a switch or a Steam deck. If the card fail, all you lose is the time to redownload everything. Anyway except if you do a lot of video, the really important data (the really personal data you’ll want to backup) is rarely in TBs. It’s mostly pictures and documents.

I remember paying $50 for a 512 MB Memory Stick Pro Duo for a PSP back in 2004

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick

And then anyone else remember the 16 MB Memory Card for Playstation? That was $20 in the early 2000s I believe

Crazy how much things change...

I paid 36€ for a 16 GB PlayStation Vita memory card just 9 years ago.

The ps2 memory card was 8MB by default, with some bigger third party ones. ps1 was ~120KB (reported in "blocks") Never thought buying a psp memory stick was worth it, since micro SD adapters existed and were orders of magnitude cheaper.

Sadly, when the vita came around, the only way to use an SD was to hack it and use an adapter in the game port. Since the vita card format was smaller than a micro SD.