I just had a quick look at major electronics retailer in my country (UK), their cheapest brand new 1TB NVMe drive goes for equivalent of 74.91 USD. Elsewhere in Europe and further, prices will get only worse, with exception for US where I expect it is cheaper to get it.
Good luck telling thousands of people everywhere on Earth to go and spend 75 bucks because their bitcoin node is failing. If this is "dirt-cheap" for you and you think people going to do it, you're dreaming. I bet most of Apollo users don't even look at this forum, so they have no idea their drives are almost full.
They can sell flip used drive for 25 bucks without a problem, then it's just 50€. I think if they afford to pay $1000 for an Apollo, they can save up another 50 for a new drive.
Otherwise they could also attach something they already have, USB-based, like a USB HDD and symlink a few things over to that.
It will all be a hacky solution though, and having an 'elegant' setup just has its cost, I guess.
As long as Apollo stock software does not ship with any Lightning Node, prune mode should be enabled urgently for 512 GB drive users, otherwise we will lose all these nodes Apollo has enabled to be in existence.
And later on, ultimately, jstefanop can develop one image for batch 1/2 users with 512 GB drive, with prune enabled and LN node disabled, and second image for everyone else, with LN enabled and no pruning. That will sort out non techy users who will just re-flash and node & miner will continue working without replacing any parts.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think pruned nodes don't seed
at all, anyway. So we don't 'lose' more nodes if they start pruning as opposed to them just shutting down.