An inventive Reddit user doesn’t want to spend money on cloud storage. However, their DIY substitute comes with certain risks.
What has the Reddit user built? Key_Sundae61 wants storage space outside of their actual computer that is also somewhat portable. However, traditional USB sticks with a few GB apparently aren’t enough for them – and paying for cloud storage year after year is too expensive.
They likely need several terabytes (TB). Therefore, they built themselves something for a similar price of 120 euros: an 8TB external hard drive connected via a dock, which means 8,000 gigabytes or about 80,000 megabytes.
They are likely using a system like this from Orico connected via USB. However, they are probably not fully confident about the idea itself, which is why they turned to Reddit to ask whether the idea was “rather foolish.” A flood of reactions and many questions followed.
Traditional USB sticks are, by the way, an essential part of many articles on MeinMMO, for example, in the following video or in this story about a found storage device on a train, which appears mysterious and even downright dangerous but ultimately disappoints quite a bit.
An idea with many flaws
Beneath the Reddit post about the quasi-USB stick, comments quickly accumulate, but primarily expressions of disbelief. People question their intentions and predict a bleak data fate, for example:
Do you really want to use this as mobile storage? […] If so, data loss with your idea is virtually inevitable; it’s just a question of when, not if.
AllMyFrendsArePixels
For the comparison of the construction with cloud storage suggests that at least a certain availability of the data outside of one’s living room is intended. And that raises questions across the board.
Why is an HDD a rather poor choice for mobile storage? What primarily distinguishes an HDD from an SSD and a USB drive as a stick is its construction. In an HDD, platters spin at high speeds around a central axis. Therefore, HDDs should not be moved once they are powered on. There is a risk that the read and write heads will crash into the platters and cause damage – even leading to failure.
When powered off, the risk is much lower, but even then, transport, especially with hard drives explicitly described for internal use, is not planned by the manufacturer. In an SSD or USB stick, nothing moves at all. Everything operates purely electrically. They are far better storage options for on-the-go, but they do not offer this immense capacity at a relatively low price of about 120 euros (excluding the dock). They tend to cost around 550, see here on Amazon.
What is great about the cloud? You can access your data from anywhere via the internet – and you are not physically carrying it around, making it susceptible to theft. However, you could be hacked since your data is theoretically available online to anyone if they have the login credentials.
But data can also be lost in the cloud, right? Theoretically yes, a cloud is only as reliable as the provider. But the chance that giants like Google, Apple, or Microsoft destroy their storage or suddenly discontinue the service is virtually zero. The lifespan of an HDD, especially as mobile storage, is expected to be much shorter.
And what if they only want to use the storage at home? In the case of purely local use, the setup would be acceptable. However, HDDs always carry a certain risk of failure. Therefore, the data should be backed up somewhere else as well.
Does the thread creator respond to the questions? No, unfortunately, neither we nor the advisors on Reddit receive a response – at least not by noon on August 7, 2024.
As talented in crafting, albeit probably equally dubious constructions, several YouTubers have proven to be who took the suits worn by desert inhabitants in Dune as a template for an experiment of a special kind. In the following article, we present the noteworthy result: The desert suits from Dune sound too good to work – Fans built one and were surprised.
