-Hi guys, Dong Ngo here today.
I'll show you how to shop for a storage devices and maybe be happy with your life.
I'm serious.
Look at how happy I am.
When it comes to storage devices, there are 3 things you want to keep in mind; the performance, the capacity, and the data safety.
I'll talk about data safety later.
But when it comes to performance and capacity, the always get the fastest and the latest on the market.
It's fun to have your hand on the best.
-I can't afford that!
-Oh, really?
Okay.
Alright.
In that case, I'll talk about picking, and choosing, and balancing the two, the performance and the capacity) so that people like my friend James here can afford them.
Now, there are 3 types of storage devices.
The first one is internal drive.
If you buy one as a main driver to a host of operating system, this is where performance is very important.
In this case, you're going to choose a smaller size storage drive, maybe about 20 gig or 240 gig, about two of those or less to use for this purpose.
You can always extend the storage of the computer by using an external drive or in case of a desktop computer, you can also use another regular hard drive as a secondary to a host data.
For example, this is one of my test machine here.
And as you can see, iUSSD over here as a main drive and then I use
another regular hard drive on top here as a drive to hold data.
This setup-- actually, the best in terms the balance between performance, capacity, and of course affordability.
Now, the second type of storage is external drive.
In this case, performance is not the most important thing, but the capacity.
So, how much is enough?
You do not need too much either, but make sure that you have a drive that has more storage space than the internal drive that you want to back it up on.
So, something between 500 gigabyte and 1 terabyte should be good for most people.
There's one exception, Thunderbolt.
These drives are actually very expensive, but they also offer very good performance and only a professional would need that.
And professional tend to spend a lot of money on their equipment.
Now, the last type of storage device is the network attached or the NAS servers such as this Synology right here.
Now, these devices are connected to your network
and therefore the performance is limited by the performance of the network itself and a gigabit network, which is the fastest option for consumer, caps at about 130 megabyte for second.
With that said, you don't have to spend money on the internal drive.
Just buy the drive that is long lasting and use less energy such as this green drive right here to use inside the NAS server.
Alright, now, let's talk about data security.
This is important because when a hard drive die,
you lose a lot more than just a drive itself.
The information it holds is actually worth more than the cost of a new drive.
For that reason, for storage, you do not want to buy used or refurbished drive.
You also want to buy a drive for the right environment.
For example, this [unk] racquet drive right here, it can handle sharp and draft and is good for people who work in the rough environment.
Oops.
The drive's okay.
My toe might be broken, but the drive is okay.
There's also another option called redundancy.
For example, this drive right here come with [unk] drive bay and you can actually set them to your one or two of the drives as redundants meaning that if one of the hard drive here die, you can replace it without losing the data.
And finally backup, instead of buying just 1 portable drive right here, you buy 2. In this case, you can put your data on 2 separate location in addition to your computer.
The good thing is these are actually very affordable
with some capacity costing a lot less than $100.
There you go.
That's it for now.
To find out more, go check out the detailed buying guide at cnet.com.
If you have a question or want to find out how happy I really am, you can reach me via Twitter or my Facebook page and you'd be very impressed and that's because I'm Dong Ngo and this has been a brief guide on how to shop for your storage.
