Why do we need hard drives if we can just store everything on the cloud?
In: Technology
The “cloud” isn’t real, it’s just someone else’s computer and hard drives
If you’re storing *a lot* then the cloud is good because they get a discount from buying sooo many hard drives that you don’t so it can be cheaper and more robust than providing tens of TB of storage yourself
But the cloud is far away and limited by your bandwidth. Even if you have Gigabit internet that’s still 20-50% as much bandwidth as a basic HDD provides so getting big files takes longer. Fast SSDs are capable of 50x as much bandwidth.
The time for anything to open also gets a lot longer pulling from the cloud, that’s why most providers also keep copies of recently accessed files on your hard drive to speed things up
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