In recent months – and like many of you, I’m sure – I’ve been faced with the situation of needing more hard drive space to store my growing collection of photos, videos, music, documents and assorted data.
So, I went out and purchased a modest 300 Gigabyte external hard drive which set me back approximately $200. So far it’s been of great benefit to me, but already I’m finding myself close to filling it up, so am now considering yet another storage device!
This got me to thinking about our ever-increasing reliance on computers and technology in our daily lives. In addition to storage and archiving, we increasingly use it to communicate, produce, emulate, monitor and control – among many other things. Early computer pioneers such as Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse would no doubt be proud of the evolvement of the computer as we know it, albeit perhaps a little daunted by how sophisticated they’ve become over the last 70 odd years.
No wonder, then, that so many of us are racing out to purchase more and more data storage devices to be able to archive and store the Gigabytes and Terrabytes of data that we accumulate.
As someone who has an appreciation of computer technology, I still find it challenging to make good buying decisions about how and when I’ll acquire data storage devices or services. Indeed, there’s a plethora of options becoming available to consumers, from PC and portable storage devices to third-party storage services like Apple’s MobileMe service which is currently being promoted off the back of the recent Apple iPhone launch.
So, which direction do I take? Which option will stand the test of time, and which option is the safest, most secure and most cost effective? These are all important questions that we’re all going to be asking ourselves more in the future, particularly as more of our data becomes electronic and more people embrace computer technology.
Five years ago, I barely had a video file stored on my PC hard drive. In 2008, my PC holds numerous family home videos and backed-up DVDs which take up several Gigabytes of space. Then there’s my increasing music collection and the growing archive of photos and working documents, equalling a significant volume of data.
To address the issue and spend wisely, I think I’ll be upgrading my portable hard drive to something far bigger than I may need just now, in order to lengthen its lifespan. However, I don’t make this decision lightly, especially based on the gradual demise of popular storage platforms such as the Zip Disk. I was once an avid user of this product, and I’m almost ashamed to admit that I used to spend over $20 for just one chunky disc that held a mere 100 Megabytes of data.
Needless to say, my steadfast investment in Zip Discs over the years has ended up costing me far more than those steep up-front costs I struggled to meet as a financially-poor student. A couple of years on, and I found myself spending a couple of days – yes, a couple of days – transferring all my data from Zip Discs onto a much bigger external hard drive, after realising that the once-superior Zip Disc was struggling to keep pace with the capacity of new storage devices such as external hard drives and even small USB drives.
So, my message is simply to choose wisely when it comes to storage devices for your data. While we may not know what tomorrow’s data storage trends will be, we can certainly try to make our lives easier in making the transition over to them. I just hope I never have to endure such a time-consuming repeat of the Zip Disc debacle by spending days transferring data from one device to another.
Rob
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