Were these hard disk recorder portable recording studios, just ahead of their time?

Korg 3200

Yamaha AW 2400

Akai DPS 24

Roland VS 2480

These machines were(are) amazing, reliable, straight forward to use.  Yet they were all discontinued more or less abruptly.  What happened?

The most serious complaint was storage media.  They used scsi drives, zip disks, hard drives all with limited storage and sometimes proprietary compression methods to try to compensate for the limited storage.

Had they been released in 2022 where we have removable (low cost) 32 gb, 512 gb, 1 terabyte SD cards and cloud storage would they be running the show today?

in 2022 these hardware multitrack recorders are hot!

Tascam Model Series

Zoom R 20

Zoom L 20

Tascam DP Portastudios

The Tascam model series can take up to 2 gb removable SD cards (that a lot of recording)
The Zoom R20 multitrack recorder can take up 1 Terabyte removable SD card
Tascam Portastudios Take 32 Gb removable SD card
Akai MPC One 32 Gb removable SD card

So if the Korg 3200, Yamaha AW2400, and Roland VS 2480 were re-released today with updated removable storage capacity would they be king of the home recording studio?

Keep in mind that some of the digital portable studios released in the early 2000’s had VGA out and mouse support so they could be connected to larger monitors!  And support the point-n-click workflow.

The Roland VS 2480 supported Plugins LOL

Several of the hardware digital record studios, porta studios , digital audio workstations from the early 2000’s had 24 tracks and hundreds of virtual tracks available for recording.

Were these machines released too early and just ahead of their time? 

Outside of unlimited track counts, these machines had/have everything DAWs have, and in most cases better than what DAWs have.  The effects on the Korg 3200, Roland VS 2480, and Tascam Portastudios are more than up for the job of producing commercial grade recordings.  Most if not all of these units offered on board mastering!

Now that processors are much much faster and removable storage media is cheaper and has considerable more capacity the argument for in-the-box-recording just doesn’t seem to look as attractive and the hardware multitrack recorder is making a come back, and offering more bang for the buck.  Or at least so it seams.......