I hear what you're saying about filling a smaller drive, so the key for me there is culling. If I saved every frame I ever took I'd have already bought two Macbooks worth of external drives. If I were to fill a 512GB card I'm going to wind up with at best 50GB in images. Now I shoot mainly wildlife so I'm often shooting at 15-30fps and looking for the 3-5 images in a several second burst that best show the bird or critter. But even if I were shooting an image at a time, there's no way I'd ever go back to 80-90% of them four months from now, let alone years from now. The cumulative total of my keepers in 2021 and 2022 totaled 330GB and 380GB respectively, which includes saved PSD files. I have the last 3 years on an SSD drive that easily slides into my laptop bag. I know conventional drives are cheaper, and they are what I use for archiving, but if I'm traveling I don't want to drag a mechanical drive with me.
