When it comes to electronic storage, you have lots of devices to choose from at a wide range of prices. Achieving the most cost-effective electronic storage system for your personal use or small business, however, requires knowing what device is best for what type of storage use. How big is the data you need to store? Do you need to store electronic data for a little while, or for years? How often will you need to access the stored data? Do you plan to reuse the same storage device over and over, or just once? This article will explain which storage media are the most efficient to use depending on how you answer these questions.
For short-term memory, like saving project files temporarily, you want something small, portable, durable, reusable, and large enough to hold your files. For long-term or permanent storage, you want something small, durable, and cheap.
For short term storage, there are three contenders: portable hard drives, memory sticks, and rewritable CDs and DVDs.
External hard drives offered the largest amount of portable storage space. You can buy a portable hard drive enclosure for as little as $25-$30. The size of the hard drive you put inside the enclosure, however, can vary widely in price, from as little as $25 for 40 gigabytes to over $100 for one terabyte. Although technically portable, external hard drives are big, heavy, bulky, and usually need to be plugged into a wall outlet to run. If you need to carry very, very large files (like database backups or raw video footage), a portable hard drive is your best (and possibly only) option.
Next up are USB flash drives, also knows as pen drives, thumb drives, and memory sticks. This has emerged as the most common and popular form of portable, reusable data storage. They can be found in all sizes at all prices, from 512 MB for $5 to 64 GB for $150. They are lightweight, small enough to be attached to a keychain, and very durable (solid state memory has no moving parts). They run off the computer’s power, are extremely easy to use, and can be reused indefinitely. They are perfect for storing small files you want to keep with you like documents, pictures, music, and even (for the larger flash drives) videos. As a form of long term storage, however, they are very expensive. Why buy a 4 GB flash drive for $30 when you can buy a blank DVD for 25 cents?
Which brings us to CDs and DVDs. A CD can hold up to 700 MB of data. DVDs can hold 4.3 GB of data, and the more expensive dual-layer DVDs can hold 8.5 GB. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs can have data written on them once. CR-RWs and DVD-RWs are reusable—they can have data written to them, erased, and different data written several times.
The reusable CD-RWs and DVD-RWs, however, are not necessarily easy to use. Whereas any computer can view data saved permanently to a CD-R, temporary data saved to a rewritable CD-RW or DVD-RW can only be viewed (or rewritten) by the program that wrote the data to the disk. To view the data on multiple computers, you need to have the same CD or DVD writing program on each computer. Although sometimes this isn’t a problem (such as when archived CDs and DVDs are only ever viewed on one computer), more often this is an inconvenience and a hassle, especially compared to the ease of portable hard drives and USB flash drives. Furthermore, CD-RWs and DVD-RWs can only be rewritten a set number of times before they can’t be read anymore.
Where CDs and DVDs really shine, however, is in long term or permanent storage, where cost is the key. CDs and DVDs are cheap. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs (where the data can only written once) are cheaper than the rewritable CD-RWs and DVD-RWs. If you buy in bulk and on sale, you can CD-Rs for as little as ten cents each, DVD-Rs for as little as 25 cents each, and dual layer 8.5 GB DVDs for as little as one dollar each. A pack of a hundred DVD-Rs, for example, will give you 430 GB of storage space for $30 – a much better price than portable hard drives or USB flash drives. CDs and DVDs are small and easily stored, and fairly durable—as long as you don’t play Frisbee with them, that is.
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
