There might be if we get to vert large models that rely more on storage than compute, but that's a lot of "ifs" in there. Maybe when people start capturing their birthdays in 16K HDR at 120 fps.
Most recently, FTC started to raise awareness and crack down on some abuse: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/....
Will take a long time to de-program and by that time nothing will be replaceable to matter due to industries march towards preventing repair altogether.
Gamers certainly are a market. Borderlands 3 for example, a 2019 game, clocks in at 75GB on Steam, GTA 5 at 105 GB, MSFS 150 GB. And that's all OLD games. CoD Black Ops wants 175 GB, GTA 6 is rumored to want anything from 100 to 300 GB. You don't want that on spinning rust.
I was hoping SSDs would get price competitive with hard drives but the progress sure has been bad lately...
(It's possible to even set up a system that lets you play a game while it's being moved over to SSD, but sadly there aren't any easy ways to do that right now.)
This is 100% true. I have a family member that literally has a decade of family photos stored in WhatsApp conversations. 10 gigs app storage used on some old iPhone, no backup.
Professionals like us know of course that the SSD is an easily upgradable component. But we also tend to know how to set up a NAS with 4x 18TB HDDs in a zfs pool that can saturate the bandwidth of any reasonable home network when transferring large files. So the market for professionals and enthusiasts don't always translate into a market for large SSDs.