For me it was the world building. The thought of a secret magical world that exists along side with ours in modern time sounded amazing.
But the World Building is no better than any books of the era. Indeed, there were plenty of other books that were far better world building around that same time. Like Wheel of Time has a far deeper, richer magic systems. His Dark Material is similar vibes and a far better magical systems. Others include The Magicians.
Yeah, the thing is, if you actually look at the Harry Potter Series, they’re actually kinda bad; at minimum, no better than any other book series of the time.
It happened to be the right place, at the right time. It was a fine book that happened to be at a time when the internet where it could speak like wildfire but before any real literary critique. Then it got a lot of media attention.
Honestly, it just happened to be Johnny on the spot. Because if you critique the books, they’re just a standard Children’s to Young Adults Fantasy Series, they’re probably a little poorly written compared to a lot of others in that space. But they just gained so much momentum.
Varies greatly based on encoder. NEVC vs CPU etc
Not asserting this isn’t the case, I’ve not noticed it, but I can’t see why this would be the case for the actual encoding. Decoding I’ve seen it make a difference but that’s mostly the pre-Skylake iGPUs using a poor implementation of QuickSync.
Honestly, for normal people things hard drive is hard drive. If it’s a hard-core high-performance DATABASE, always spinning ZFS pool then MAYBE it’ll matter. But for just storing data, like a normal use case, heck even a heavy normal use case like photo/video storage where you’re caching on an SSD for editing but fairly intensely reading/writing back to the drive, it’s fine.
The only time it’ll probably matter is if it’s someone else’s money, then just get the expensive drives so you don’t get blamed (enterprise), it’s some super intense database or something, or Security systems there are some benitifs for a drive designed to be CONSTANTLY written to.
VPN, Cloud storage, cloud hosting.
Yeah, even the Nikon 50mm 1.4D vs the 50mm 1.4G the difference in image quality is night and day. The D is also tiny compared to the G. Unfortunately, it’s a somewhat immutable fact of physics that good quality optics are big and heavy.