The Downsides of Hard Drives

Hard drives are the most easily recognizable storage solution on the market. Yet they are also one of the least efficient and least secure options. So why do we still use them? There are valid reasons: you might be in a remote place without internet access for the cloud, or you might prefer physical backups of data housed elsewhere. While these are logical, you should also be aware of the downsides of relying solely on hard drives. **Latent Mechanical Failures** Unlike more modern solid-state drives, hard disk drives are clunky—not only because they take up a significant amount of space, but also because they have a lot of moving parts. The fragility of these machines may surprise you. Inside any HDD is a disk that can be easily contaminated by microplastics, microscopic particles and even exposure to air, putting the drive at risk of failure. It's not unusual for HDDs to fail completely after being contaminated. It’s also unreliable when shooting a project in the field, as being banged around and transported can damage the insides. The more moving parts in a drive, the more likely it is to fail. An SSD is a similar alternative, but without the moving components. SSDs have a yearly failure rate of 0.58 percent, compared to 10.56 percent for a traditional HDD, and are often faster. However, SSDs have their downsides too. They have a limited number of times data can be written. Once that limit is reached, the drive can no longer store or encode any new data. **Personal Mistakes** People can be careless—hey, we're all only human. However, these human errors give us more reasons to invest in higher-quality technology, to account for our own inevitabilities. You can forget to back up your data, drop or misplace your drive or fall for a phishing scam that lands a virus on your physical devices. It doesn’t matter what kind of drive you use—in all these cases, your data can be lost. A cloud-based storage system, on the other hand, is invulnerable to these human errors. When you save data on a hard drive, you are solely responsible for whatever happens to it. There is no way to guarantee your data will remain protected without additional backups. This is in stark contrast with cloud storage companies, who alleviate that risk by employing strict data-security policies, expert technicians and routine check-ups. **Obsolete Technology ** Of all these downsides to hard drives, the biggest one might be their inevitable obsolescence. As file sizes grow ever larger, write speeds for drives must keep up. This is one area where drives have an edge on cloud storage: cloud companies rely on internet speeds to upload content quickly, which take significantly longer than drives to improve. New drives come out every year with lightning-fast write speeds to accommodate larger media resolutions and file sizes. However, the downside is clear: your old drives will show their age. That super modern (and expensive) 1 TB drive you bought a decade ago won’t hold a handle to what’s on the market today. Buying drives puts you in an endless cycle of trying to keep up, while the old ones become archives for old projects. **Conclusion **A true investment in the future of your storage is one that guarantees the safety and security of your data with accessible retrieval and space efficiency. The only storage solution that checks off every box on the list is cloud computing. Cloud companies provide fast data retrieval without the security faults of personal error and latent mechanical mishaps that hard drives warrant. Learn more about efficient, secure, and innovative storage solutions at alteon.io.