What are potential pitfalls of using external hard drives for storing data in PHP applications?

One potential pitfall of using external hard drives for storing data in PHP applications is the risk of slower read and write speeds compared to using local storage. This can lead to performance issues, especially with large amounts of data or frequent access. To mitigate this, you can optimize your code to minimize the number of read and write operations to the external hard drive.

// Example of optimizing code to reduce read and write operations to external hard drive
$externalDriveData = getDataFromExternalDrive(); // Read data from external hard drive

// Perform operations on the data in memory
$processedData = processData($externalDriveData);

// Write the processed data back to the external hard drive
writeDataToExternalDrive($processedData);