Some like WD & Sammie still maintain current price but likely will go up soonish.

I never said there was no HDD development at all, but that such innovations are still in the enterprise/data server commercial market. For regular office/home PC users it still not reach us yet unless we go for enterprise stuff and thats something majority PC users likely dont have. You can ask your less tech savvy relatives/frens if they had NAS with enterprise drives see how many got.

When I said backup to cloud its either MS Onedrive or Googledrive, these are usually automatic ON if you have log on account, and most PC users are usually tied to either MS account or Google. And usually the data thats normally precious to most are photos & videos which people these days upload to Insta or Tiktok or FB for sharing but also a kinda cloud storage. Relatively speaking theres a whole lot more people upload to cloud whether they realise or not and thats why its more common than actively having a NAS.

Not to say NAS has no demand but its not automatic you get it, geddit?

Powered-off Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) can typically retain data for a decade or longer, but a powered-off Solid-State Drive (SSD) may begin to experience data degradation within a year. The exact time depends on the drive type, storage conditions, and its age. For reliable long-term data preservation, regular backups are the most important strategy.

Data retention in SSDs (Flash memory)

SSDs store data as electrical charges in cells, and these charges can dissipate over time, especially in unpowered drives. How quickly this occurs depends on the drive's design:

    High-end SSDs: SLC NAND-based drives, used in many high-end and enterprise SSDs, can retain data for 5–10 years unpowered.

    Consumer-grade SSDs: More common TLC and QLC NAND drives offer less durability. Without power, they might begin to lose data in as little as 1–3 years, especially if the drive was heavily used before being put into storage. Higher ambient temperatures also accelerate charge leakage.

    Firmware refresh: Unlike HDDs, simply powering on an SSD does not refresh the charge in the cells. For long-term storage, you must periodically power on the drive and rewrite the data to ensure integrity.

if ur saying nas is niche i agreed. but like the stats showed, it's an upward trend, so more people r getting it is all i was saying. but yes even now it's still niche 

u and me understand backups. but my bru he think u put the data on nas then leave it powered off for ever until you need it. No... that's not how that works. Even hdd they said it needs to have power at least once a year or the magnetic stuff loses their charge (bit rot)
this why my backup i'll at least power it on roughly twice a year and mostly for performing backup. all do raid scrub and check smart while at it.