Stop using external hard drives
Tags: Productivity, Programming, Software Development, Hardware, Cloud Computing

Now let’s look at what cloud storage provide. AWS S3 or Google Cloud offers storage plans claiming 99.999999999% durability or 11 nines. To put it simply, for 10'000 objects (files) it may lose one every 10 million years. Now that’s durability I’m talking about. It means my most embarrassing moments captured in the photo will be kept for generations.

There are less durable options (according to Service Level agreements) for less price but they are still impressively durable. They achieve it with data redundancy. Data is replicated across several availability zones, datacenters. If one becomes unavailable or destroyed by asteroid data is still stored on the other ones.

It is like having 3 external hard drives in 3 different facilities, separated geographically, guarded, secured and always online. And with backup power sources. But more reliable because service is provided by industry giants pioneering in the cloud business for years.

The hard drive has compatibility problems

Don’t even get me started on connecting hard drive to different computers and OS.

I started with Windows on the Asus laptop, then switched to Linux and finally landed with MacBook. If the drive worked fine with Windows, it was a pain to use with another system because of file system incompatibility. I either need to format it in NTFS or EFS4 and use it with one OS only.

I haven’t enough UNIX evil in my soul to make it work. I just wanted data to be available. Why do I need this pain in the ass?

The hard drive is not flexible

When I travel I want as few cables and devices as possible. Do I need to book baggage for my hard drives and live in constant fear of getting my data corrupted? No, sir! They going to be recycled, except there is no company in my country that is going to recycle that trash. And creators of that junk don’t bother either.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Hard drive storage is fucking overrated

Hard storage is the cheapest (although slowest) part of computational resources nowadays. However, big companies like Apple or Samsung needs money (who doesn’t) and squeeze any additional dollar of potential profit. For example, they charge additional X% of the initial device price for each 64GB of additional storage. They force us to worry about how to fit all media that we produce and consume. And we overpay for 1–2TB SSD. Same device. 1TB. Twice the price.

Companies once produced floppy drives and CDs now produce flash drives and external hard drives. If we look closely and compare the prices for hard storage vs cloud storage, you may be surprised.

Apple 16' MacBook difference between 512GB and 1TB is 400$. The difference between MacBook Air 256GB and 512GB is 250$. Apple thinks that 256GB costs 250$. Ok.

Microsoft Surface Go difference between 128GB and 256GB versions is 50$. Microsoft charges 50$ for 128GB — 150% less than Apple.

On Amazon, you can buy an external hard drive with 1TB capacity for about 100$. It is way cheaper than top laptops with built-in memory.

Using AWS S3 we can store 1TB of data for ~1$, ~4$, ~13$ or ~22$ per month depending on the frequency of access. Google Cloud Storage offers to store 1TB for ~4$, 7$, 10$ or 26$. Azure Storage has similar prices. Oracle offers 32GB for free forever! You make conclusions.

Data stored on the cloud will have high durability if set up correctly. It will be secured and accessible from any place on Earth with the internet. And free of ritual dancing around hard disks, system drivers, USB connectors and cables.

Cloud economy rules.

But you still need fast internet to access it, though.