Data Storage : Ultimate Buying Guide

Wondering what type of local storage device suits you ? This article gets you on a ride to know all types of storage options from internal hard drives to advanced NAS devices and Cloud features.

This blog will examine each type of drives and bring afore the scenario closest to your requirements thus helping you decide your suitable local storage drive.

Internal Hard Drives

Internal Hard Drive is basic type of hard drive that resides on your desktop or laptop. They have storage capacity ranging from 500 GB to 1 TB while in desktops this can be further expanded to 6 TB. In desktop, the hard drive can be expanded by adding as many internal hard disks to it as are allowed by the number of connectors on your motherboard, while this can be done to laptops as well. In order to assemble another internal drive in a laptop, thickness of the drive should be taken into utmost consideration.

Solid State Drive (SSD) is better for laptops when compared to internal hard drive in terms of faster retrieval and writing of data. Also, SSD’s are lighter, less power consuming and absence of moving parts for operation eludes noise. The only drawback is SSD’s tilt more towards better performance than improving storage capacities.

An SSHD (Solid State hybrid Drive) shadows out the storage capabilities of an SSD and hence are better. An SSHD comprises of an SSD component for faster performance and still have storage capacities as large as 1 TB.

External Desktop Hard Drives

Now comes the External Hard Drives, they are house to all your data storage. External Storage is available in all sizes ranging up to 8 TB or even more depending on the physical size and model. As they require a USB 3.0 to connect to laptop, desktop or even smart TV’s USB port and play videos, music and photos stored on the external drive and there is no additional software installation required.

Portable External Hard Drives

Portable external drives are portable enough to be kept in your backpack and travel with you to places or kept in your pocket and be taken to office. Their storage capacity ranges from 500GB to 4 TB. It is recommended to keep your external hard drive encrypted in case of accidental damage and loss of the hard drive.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

As the name defines, NAS drive connects directly to your router and shares data to every device connected to the same network , be it laptop, desktop, tablet or a smart phone. In order for NAS to work efficiently the router must be good and satisfy minimum requirements for the drive’s connection whose interface is Ethernet and of gigabit variety.

NAS device requires a bit of installation process to follow and a bit of understanding to get it connected to the network and to make your devices access it. NAS devices comes with a guide to help you in the installation process and tools to find and install your devices. For Physical installation, vendors like Seagate and WD offer pre- configured devices while other vendors like Asustor, Quap, Syonology have just the case and you can install software of your choice.

NAS devices support two or more bays and hence they support RAID arrays, so if one of the drives corrupts RAID’s mirroring technique will help you get the data back by rebuilding the array. It must be noted that using RAID 1 halves your drive capacity, so in a drive of 8TB, 4 will be used to keep data while the other half will be used to keep backup.

Wireless Portable Hard Drives

Wireless capable hard Drive is also a network supported drive and also you can use it in the go while traveling or in a movie. This device creates a network of its own and your devices, desktop, laptop or smart phone can connect to it. The bandwidth powered by network is plenty enough to stream a full HD movie or transfer files with devices in close proximity.

Cloud-Enabled Drives

These drives are supported by a Web-based service which connects your hard drive from anywhere even if you are geographically poles apart from your actual hard drive. You have to have an internet connection and sign- up for the service, thus enabling you to access your files remotely

On-the-Go USB Drives

These days many-a- phones have just internal storage capacity but not a facility for microSD. An on-the-go USB drive comes to rescue in such cases. To use this drive your device must be OTG drives enabled.

This drive not only connects to mobile phone but also to computers as it has two ends to it, one a regular port and another a micro USB port.

Conclusion

With the ever expanding data and hence the collection of music, movies, videos or photos we never would want to delete what we have cherished for years. You can know more about data storage options and get a range from Tesco.

So start expanding your storage horizons and keep your memories intact, decide on the best local storage platform and cater to the data expansion needs.