I feel like we don’t appreciate the history of data storage enough! It’s kind of wild looking at how different the world was when CD-Rs came out. They could store substantially more data than a typical hard drive of the time and were dirt cheap. So you would get bulletin boards hosting content from optical drives and stuff. It’s also (partially) why you would have to use discs for games in the past, instead of just installing them to the hard drive. When hard drives are expensive it’s probably better to just stream music and assets from an optical disc instead of taking up precious space. Sometimes you could play a game (or part of it) without the disc, but you wouldn’t get music because that was left on the disc.

I would even argue most storage is used as write once storage. From backup systems to libraries, a lot of data is data we want to just record, and never overwrite.

Seems like thered be some extra hoops to get through for differential backups, impossible to us for most daily applications, probably better suited for things like laboratory and archives…