Do you know the best place to store your computer files? More precisely, will the files be stored locally, on a hard drive or a solid state drive (SSD), or online. How about two years from now? Five years?
There are two conflicting trends in the arena of computer storage. The first relates to the capacity of hard drives which has increased almost exponentially over the past several years. We now have internal storage capacity on our Macs that was unimaginable a mere five years ago. Similarly, the capacity of solid state drives is rapidly increasing while the cost continues to decrease.
On the other hand, online storage is more available and somewhat more affordable. In addition, the Internet has become more reliable and download and upload speeds have increased so that the cloud can be used not only as a backup mechanism, but more often as a primary or secondary storage mechanism (e.g., Evernote).
A third trend which undercuts the importance of the first two is the displacement of personal computers by tablets. Many tablet users have comparatively simple computing needs, primarily email and web surfing; they don't need much local storage and certainly not cloud storage.
Let's examine the first two trends in a bit more detail.
Hard Drive Storage
The minimum capacity of the hard drive or SSD that comes with an iMac is 1 TB for a hard drive and 768 GB for an SSD; with the 2 models of the MacBook Air, a 64 or 128 GB SSD; and with the 3 models of the MacBook Pro, 128, 256, or 512 GB of SSDs. 2 and 3 TB drives are now available at relatively reasonable prices and some 4 TB drives are now available. 256, 512 and 768 SSDs are available, although expensive.
Unless you're deep into video processing or storing thousands of images or hundreds of movies, it's unlikely that you will come close to needing 1 TB of storage.
For example, at 2 MB per photo, 1 TB will store 500,000 photos; at 4 MB per MP3, more than 250,000 songs; at 2 GB per movie, 500 movies; and at 1,200 characters per page, more than 800 million pages of text.
Online Backup and Storage
Online backup has become an accepted procedure for many businesses, particularly larger ones. Online storage is considered reliable and the Internet is, with rare exceptions, always accessible. Transmissions can be encrypted, as can stored files. Many businesses have found that online storage is no more costly than maintaining data centers. In addition, companies which specialize in providing online storage often have more technological expertise than a business in which data processing and storage are not the primary focus. Protecting storage against intrusion requires highly specialized skills which are not economical for most businesses to provide for themselves.
As online backup becomes more accepted, online storage is also beginning to be accepted by business. After all, if a business data center is not located on the premises, which is often the case, especially if the business has multiple locations, then the argument against off-site storage doesn't have much traction.
For individual consumers, however, it doesn't make economic sense to backup online, let alone to go online for primary storage. This becomes obvious when you compare the cost of a hard drive with the cost of online storage for a five-year period. Of course, many online storage providers provide as much as 5 GB of free storage. If you want to divide your storage among several online storage providers, it's not going to cost you much money, but I doubt that many users will go to that effort.
Posted with Blogsy
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