Nah, by 2012 newcomers didn't bought SSDs en masse yet, USB drives were extremely common (I think my USB3 Transcend 25M3 is from that time) and some still used

Nah, by 2012 newcomers didn't bought SSDs en masse yet, USB drives were extremely common (I think my USB3 Transcend 25M3 is from that time) and some still used mobile racks, slowly replaced by USB dock stations. Most of the time people replaced HDD to SSD in the laptops only to use ODD caddy to move their HDD there. By 2010 storage was not a problem, at all. If anything the torrenting reached it's peak ~2008 and on a slow decline (but not in absolute numbers, because the userbase is still rising) ever since, because by 2010 almost any music could be found on YouTube (popular ofc, not something obscure what is known by 3 greybeards on the whole planet) and even a lot of movies too. For the parts of the world where broadband was still costly or capped you could always go to the store and buy 5-in-1 DVD for $2 (talk about quality, eh). After that the succesful multi year campaign by Apple to convince the user what it doesn't need to own music and what it is totally okay to stream "your" music over the cellular networks, along with %he rise of the streaming services, moved the torrenting to a niche of nerds (only lossless music!), nerds (248 variants of StarWars) or nerds (anime).