Welcome to the forum Gulagman.
Now i wonder where would Americans put a gulag,,,,, Alaska maybe, some god forsaken Aleutian island.
Sadly what you are asking do not exist, at least not in consumer cameras, but some commercial systems do record to a HDD / SSD, though of the SATA type in afraid.
And those commercial systems are most often multi channel and for sure not 4K
If you go the way of a better kind of storage, well then you also need some form of smart backup management, so in case you have a full 2TB drive you dont backup the same files 2 times.
Also you need a fast access to that drive unless it is " hot " swappable, so my thoughts have always been. 1 : proper fast wifi - 2 : using a thumb drive to plug into a hidden plug.
I am firmly supporting you on this as i want to see, high resolution, and also higher than current bitrates in any dashcam, so to do that you do need a fast drive, and not least if you have several channels.
It also play well into another thing i like, but the market in general dont seem to like, and that is remote systems where the camera units are remote from the main box, CUZ this mean you can make that box fairly big so it cam accommodate a proper cooling solution, you will need if you run high bitrates and high resolutions., this could even be active cooled with a fan to help things, this would also be very useful in parking guard mode, where a car in the sun can get blast furnace hot.
My own experience experimenting with 2 similar 1080p cameras back in the day, well they was 18 mbit, but really the footage only became mostly perfect when i hit 28 mbit.
Now my 4K/60 FPS action camera it record 100 mbit, but to do that for the duration of a full battery, well it will have to be a windy day
It would also be nice to see more current compression used, like AV1, even if some in here already argue against the use of H.265 as many public computers can not handle something like that.
But i am focussed on my own convenience, and if there will be a issue with others down the road i will handle that if / when i get to it.
A removable drive, say in some form of caddy, that would be nice too, if there was some form of dock you could plug it into at the computer and take full advantage of the memory devices read speed and your nice fat USB 3 / 4 plug in your computer.
CUZ that would be speeds way faster then the 60 - 70 MB/s i see on my fastest memory cards.
Such a camera well i would gladly spend the price for a 2 TB M.2 drive, which are quite reasonable ATM VS the price for little memory cards.
