But it’s text, an entire persons message history can be stored very cheaply.

A million words is only 2MB.

Most people are expexted to text less than 10 millions words in a lifetime.

An entire persons lifetime message history is only 20MB, that’s trivial to store.

If they want to charge to save media, thats fine, but text backups should be free

How much is the subscription?

Why does the author care about raytracing?

Hardly anybody uses raytracing on desktop why would they do it on a phone?

I have a 3080 but I never use raytracing because it’s not worth the loss in framerate.

Admiral Pasalk may not have been evil, but he was a jerk.

Recent controversy over an absurdly high failure rate.

https://www.theverge.com/22291828/sandisk-extreme-pro-portable-my-passport-failure-continued

Might be fixed now, but i wouldn’t gamble.

Your best bet is probably to make your own.

Find a high quality NVMe drive and put it in a USB enclosure.

If the USB ports or anything other than the drive fail, the data is easily recoverable.

Given your use case, buying an external drive is probably fine, just don’t get one from SanDisk.