Why do we need hard drives if we can just store everything on the cloud?
In: Technology
You’re basically talking about an old-time computer terminal. That works fine when the storage is on a high-speed network in your building. Your data is still on hard drives, just hard drives in big racks, and you get a tiny slice of that.
But over the Internet? You have lag time between your terminal and the cloud computers. I just pinged [icloud.com](https://icloud.com) a bunch, and the best time to get a response back was 31 milliseconds, worst 87 milliseconds. Your computer constantly uses your storage, and it works as quickly as it does with response times a lot faster than that. Everything would slow down if your only storage was on the cloud.
And then there’s bandwidth. You’re expecting the average disk to give you data at well over 100 megabytes per second. Your cloud connection will give you a fraction of that even if you’re on a 1 Gb connection at home (which most of us don’t have).
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