People love to dunk on hard drives (it's me, I'm people) because of their antiquated speeds, questionable reliability, and just the fact that they're huge and heavy. And that's fair — it's the age of SSDs. For the vast majority of users, there's no reason to keep using HDDs anymore, unless you need tons of cheap storage on your PC or home NAS device.

Even external hard drive usage has dropped since file sharing and cloud storage services became seamless and popular. What was once an essential accessory is now mostly used by creative professionals and those storing TBs worth of data in cold storage. However, I still have a 2TB external hard drive that I regularly use. I guess I'm set in my ways after years of keeping at least one external drive with me at all times.

4 Watching local media on TV

I'm still setting up my NAS

For as long as I can remember, I've had a sizable collection of movies and shows I own on an external hard drive. What started on a 500GB drive now resides on a 2TB Adata HD710 Pro. Be it in my free time during my university days, in my post-work spare time, or now when I need to watch something with my partner, I always connect my external drive to my device of choice. First, it was a laptop, then a PC, and now a TV.

Streaming services remove content on a whim, and often don't have titles in 4K. This makes me think that ditching my external hard drive completely is still in the far future. Sometimes, I keep my hard drive plugged into my PC and simply access it from the Plex client on my TV. I definitely intend to create an always-on NAS device ready to serve my favorite content as needed. Until then, however, my external drive will remain in use.

3 Moving stuff between my work and personal computer

The hard drive serves some of my business needs too

Running a high-end boutique PC business, I always need more storage. Whether it's archival footage, finalized brand assets, or other assorted media, I prefer saving everything on an offline storage dive. Google Drive provides ample cloud storage on my business account, but I can't bring myself to leave just a single copy of everything online, and not back it up somewhere else.

Whenever I transfer data from my work laptop to my external hard drive, I need to offload some stuff to my desktop PC too. The drive has now become an integral part of my workflow. I don't edit photos and videos myself, but I still need some files on my personal computer when I need to post something on our Instagram or LinkedIn account. There are better ways of managing this, sure, but my current setup is simple and works for me.

2 Backing up personal photos and videos

I've got decades worth of memories here

When I first got a camera phone back in 2010 (I think), I used to store all of my photos and videos on my home PC. As I moved between phones, and file sizes started rising, I had to buy an external hard drive to reduce the load on my PC's storage. Since then, I've always kept all my personal media neatly organized into proper folders on my external hard drive, which now has a generous 2TB capacity.

We all have adopted cloud storage as a trusted repository for our photos and videos. I have too, with everything on my Pixel 7 automatically backed up on Google Photos, but I'm planning to shift to a self-hosted setup soon. And I'll need my external hard drive as a stop-gap before I figure out if I want to buy a couple of internal HDDs for my future home NAS device.

1 Additional storage for my PS4

It's got tons of games that I don't want to uninstall

I remember buying the PS4 Slim back in 2018 and starting off with Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us — spoiling everything else for myself. However, the base storage of the PS4 quickly ran out as my game collection expanded, and I had to buy an external hard drive as secondary storage. The PS4 never shipped with an SSD anyway, so I didn't notice any performance difference when playing something from the external drive.

I've still not bought a PS5 as the game library never fully convinced me to make the switch. Now that the PS5 Pro is out, I hope we get some truly great titles soon so I can consider dropping $700 on it. Till then, I'll continue enjoying my favorite titles on the PS4, with my trusted hard disk hopefully surviving until it's no longer needed.

External drives are handy, but I always worry about durability

In my experience, external hard drives have come to the rescue whenever I needed simple and reliable additional storage. What they've also done, at least on one occasion, is fail on me. Before I bought my current 2TB drive, my previous drive started developing read errors, and finally became unresponsive. It happened after 8 years of use, but it was still enough to cause panic as my entire photo and video collection was on it.

Perennial storage might not be possible on hard drives (internal or external), so I'll have to think of alternate methods. Nonetheless, as long as I act on time whenever a drive shows signs of failure, I can keep using external hard drives for mass storage. If SSDs become as affordable as HDDs at larger capacities, we might get over hard drives completely. Until then, the world is big enough for both SSDs and HDDs.