> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month
Out of curiousity, how do you come up with a number for this? I would have zero idea of how to even start estimating such a thing, or even being able to tell you whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers.
I'd be very interested in hearing alternative estimates, but here's my working:
The lowest cost I could find to rent a server SSD was US$5 per TB-month, and it's often much higher. If we assume that markets are efficient (or inefficient in a way that disadvantages gaming PCs), we could stop thinking there and just use US$2.50 as a conservative lower bound.
I checked the cost of buying a machine with a 2 TB rather than 1 TB SSD; it varied a lot by manufacturer, but it seemed to line up with $2.50 to $5 per TB-month on a two-to-five-year upgrade cycle.
One reason I halved the number is because some users (say, a teenager who only plays one game) might have lots of unused space in their SSD, so wasting that space doesn't directly cost them anything. However, unused storage costs money, and the "default" or "safe" size of the SSD in a gaming PC is mostly determined by the size of games - so install size bloat may explain why that "free" space was purchased in the first place.
> whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers
As long as storage has a price, use of storage will have a price :-)
Maybe average cost of next-size-up SSD price divided by a SWAG of a gaming PC lifetime? So if I had to buy a 2 TB NVMe stick instead of a 1 TB stick it's an extra $70 and I upgrade after 5 years that's only about $1 per TB-Month. I don't game I have no idea if those are good numbers.
The cheapest storage tier on s3 with instant retrieval is $.004 per GB-Month which implies AWS can still make money at $4 per TB-Month so $2.50 for consumer hardware sounds reasonable to me.
Out of curiousity, how do you come up with a number for this? I would have zero idea of how to even start estimating such a thing, or even being able to tell you whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers.