> Alternatively: do you want to have 4x more capacity at 1/100th the reliability?

If the original drive has sufficient reliability, then yes I do want that.

And the majority of consumers do, too.

Chasing absolute extreme highest powered off durability is not a priority for 99% of people when the drives work properly for typical use cases. I have 5 year old SSDs where the wear data is still in the single digit percentages despite what I consider moderately heavy use.

> I have an old SLC USB drive which is only 512MB, but it's nearly 20 years old and some of the very first files I wrote to it are still intact (I last checked several months ago, and don't expect it's changed since then.) It has probably had a few hundred full-drive-writes over the years --- well worn-out by modern QLC/TLC standards, but barely-broken-in for SLC.

Barely broken in, but also only 512MB, very slow, and virtually useless by modern standards. The only positive is that the files are still intact on that old drive you dusted off.

This is why the market doesn’t care and why manufacturers are shipping TLC and QLC: They aren’t doing a planned obsolescence conspiracy. They know that 20 years from now or even 10 years from now that drive is going to be so outdated that you can get a faster, bigger new one for pocket change.

The only positive is that the files are still intact

WTF? That is the only reason to have non-volatile storage.

faster, bigger

I don't care one bit if it doesn't hold data long enough to not worry about while off. Otherwise it's just like RAM.