The problem is that in three years, the cost for a disk has usually fallen through the floor. If you're paying top dollar for that drive today, it is likely to cost less than half that in three years.
I agree completely. Well said sir. You demonstrate something interesting to me: the fundamental flaccidity of the logic underpinning the decision to buy tech that is fancier/more expensive than strictly needed, concurrent with the failure to recognize that the buyer is essentially motivated by (I am going to coin some French terms right now)
choses brillantes as opposed to
choses utiles.
One problem, I think, with technical guys like us, is they simply *WANT* "better" stuff for its own sake ("choses brillantes"). They worry about justifying that later. It doesn't really matter, at all, if they need it. That's why everyone has a Xeon ($250+) here when 85% of them could have an i3 ($129) or, even, a G3220 ($45), and literally not be able to measure the difference during normal, organic usage. That's why everyone has hot swap, when they'll probably never swap anything. That's also why a lot of people have SATA DOMs, L2ARC's, ZIL's, and everything else. (Of course,
some people do need those things, and they are must-haves in some contexts. But in many cases they are just spinning rims on your tires.)
And so on and so on and so on. Typically, when queried on the point, the person overbuying their tech (or anything else) will have some kind of
a posteriori and
ad hoc argument about "convenience", the "value of his time", "future proofing" (that's my favorite), or (especially) "resale value". But the truth is, they chose to buy the fancier tech
a priori, and the justifications are dishonest in nature as they did not fundamentally inform the tech buying decision.
In your journey through tech, nothing will actually empower you more than the hundreds (or thousands) of dollars you will save every year by asking yourself hard questions about what you truly need, and what you need to stay "in the game" and intellectually engaged in tech.
On the other hand, common consumers overbuying their tech, effectively, subsidize me, since it takes some of the profit pressure off of the pricing points for other equipment. For example, you can bet the WD Red is $10 or $20 cheaper than it would otherwise be because they've got suckers and commercial enterprises buying the WD Red pro. :)