How Not to Overspend and Save Money on Hard Drives

Hard drives are the physical and accessible stage devices that we are using in this technology era. Mechanical, SSD or Cloud, whatever you call it by the name, the data will finally has to store in a physical device.

You might have learnt in the school days that computers’ hardware is perishable and can worn out with time. Of course, hardware would. Because they will be made form the earthly available materials only.

The bottom line is that we end up buying a new hard drive if anything goes wrong with the existing one. Sometime it is not about the buying a new hard drive, it is about saving the money.


Any hard drive with emulators and heavy tools installed will worn out sooner than expected. The best way to retreat the investment of money on new HDDs is to avoid ignoring the health status of the devices.

We have many HDD health showing tools available for both Windows, Mac and Linux. Some of these tools not only monitor the status of the health of the hard drive but also provide simple options to defrag, delete junk and optimize the drives at regular intervals.

Let’s see what should we focus on, in order to save money on hard drives maintenance and while buying them.

Avoid bad and incompatible software

Bad software means the programs that destroy the system software while running. Software like emulators and simulators destroy the hardware by force rendering the capability of the hardware to perform. They even overtake the control of the file system format on the local machines to operate the tools on the emulator with their native environment.

A hard drive of 500GB (suppose) will be divided into 450GB and 50GB (suppose the emulator assigned memory) for the emulator and that chunk of memory will be differently formatted for the native file support the emulator. This leaves the hard drive summarize the total storage on the computer as 450GB.

The emulator assigned memory can be retrieved later after removing the emulator software on the system but, the part of storage that was assigned will dump a lot of junk and bad clusters while re-formatting back to computer’s file format. This leaves the system loss some part of the hard drive storage as dead memory.

Use the emulators rarely. It is always better to buy a specific device or hardware instead of emulating it on the working system.

The less you use the emulators on the computer the less are the chances of hard drive failure. The less the chances of hard drive failure the less the chances of buying a new hard drive. Thus, your money will be saved.

Buy hard drives with large capacity at one time

You may not need the high capacity storage drives for your usage. But the need for data storage will never end. The greed for information will always open doors to storage expansion on your computer.

If you compare the prices of the storage devices, the larger capacity hard drives are cheaper than the lower capacity hard drives. For example, Seagate Expansion 1TB Portable External Hard Drive costs $55 where as same Seagate Expansion with 2TB Portable External Hard Drive costs just $80. The 5TB version of same Seagate Expansion Portable External Hard Drive costs just $130. Hope you got my point.

Buy/expand cloud storage instead of multiple hard drives

You can also save money on hard drives by opting for cloud storages. You can access your data anywhere with a computer having an internet connection. If you wanted to expand the storage, you would be having to upgrade to a higher storage plan. That’s it.

Pricing on the cloud storages will have to be paid monthly. If we take Google Drive as an example, spending $1.99 per month on 100GB monthly is a worthy investment if you are a power data user. Their highest plan is $299.99 for 30TB storage monthly.

If you are running a business, it is completely worth going for Google cloud storage.

Hope that helps!