~snip~
We have not shown any signs of being close to the theoretical limit but we are slowing down. Franky is right that we have evolved very quickly from things that we thought would be with us for a long time. CDs were very popular and people thought that it would be a method of storage for many years but they are now redundant so redundant that people do not have dvd players and do not have a cd tray in their computers.
I think the motivation for consumer storage might be the theoretical limit instead of the actual limit. hard drives wil continue to expand by a lot but they will be aimed at companies that need a lot of storage and cloud storage provides. The average consumer does not use more then 4TB atm and with other technologies slowing down and hitting their limit like games where the hardware is stronger then the things it relies on I think that could be what happens in the next 5-10 years. Consumer level hard drives might continue to be cheap but probably will not be made in smaller sizes corporate ones will probably continue to expand at a fast rate but will be more expensive to purchase.
Yeah, I would agree that whatever is being sold mainstream gives you a good indication of what the average user is going to be expecting to be the maximum storage.
For example, the new Mac mini with the M2 Pro comes with configuration options ranging from 512GB to 8TB. So that gives you an idea of what's mainstream these days. 512GB being the bare minimum to run a system, and if you need some extra space, you can get up to 8TB, without doing any installation yourself.
So, clearly 500GB of Bitcoin data is not too much these days.