External high capacity spinning rust are definitely not dead, unless money is no object for you to go all SSDs. Don't forget SSDs went up in price recently. Las

External high capacity spinning rust are definitely not dead, unless money is no object for you to go all SSDs. Don't forget SSDs went up in price recently. Last year you could buy a 4TB Samsung SATA SSD for the price of these 6TB HDDs, but since then it has doubled in price due to a reduction in supply across the entire NAND manufacturing industry, making large HDDs like these price competitive again, which is probably why WD launched them now. Yeah it's slow but you're not meant to boot and run apps off these, just to hoard your Nextcloud, backups, holiday photos and "legitimately obtained" music and movies in a form factor that can be easily picked up and taken on the go, instead of tied to a desk with an external power brick like the 3.5 inch ones or NASs. Granted I might be in a bubble and the market for affordable compact portable high capacity external HDDs might be a low demand niche at this point, but I personally will pick one up when it becomes available since it fits my budget and personal use case perfectly.