Storage. You want as much as possible.
But where's the best place for it?
Data storage is always an important issue
to consider. Not just the amount of storage you have, but what form it takes,
and how secure you make it. This goes double in an educational context, where
proper backups can mean the difference between passing your course and failing
it, and data integrity could determine whether you spend an evening in
detention or get let out on time.
With hard drive storage so cheap, data
storage in an educational context isn't about volume - at least, not for the
most part. Even the largest documents take up only the tiniest fraction of any
storage device you care to name, and not since the days of floppy disks has
running out of space for a project been a concern. Instead, students should be
more concerned with a device's integrity, its reliability, its portability and
- of course - its cost. In this guide, we'll help you figure out the options
available to you, and determine which of them fit your needs best.
Hard Disk Drives
The humble hard disk has been the key data
storage component of every home computer for decades now, and it's not hard to
see why: they're cheap, they store more than enough data for one person, and
they generally remain functioning for years without any significant errors.
If you're a student heading off to
university, it's a good idea to make sure your computer has a large hard drive
in it, if for no other reason than the limited space of halls/shared housing
means you'll probably be using it as a media hub. A computer is an excellent
place to store all of your music, videos, and (of course) games in addition to
any academic work, and the low cost of hard drives (even appreciating prices
have been lower) makes them ideal for turning PCs into data pack-mules in
exactly this manner.
Of course, if you're just using your PC for
work and nothing more, there's no great need for a large hard drive. Even the
smallest on the market will be more than adequate for keeping your projects
stored and saved, and barring any freak incidents, should retain your data for
many years. Certainly, you can expect them to hold until you've passed your
exams.
If you're buying a new HDD, there are many
brands to choose from. The differences between each are generally minor, but
the best-reviewed manufacturers tend to be Seagate and Western Digital, so you
may want to pay a little extra for devices with those brands attached. Make
sure to note whether you need to buy a SATA or IDE drive. SATA is the most
up-to-date connection, but much older motherboards may not support the
technology. It's worth checking.
It's worth pointing out that although the
probability of a freak drive crash is very low, it's never zero. For this
reason, you shouldn't use a hard drive as your only storage area. Yes, you can
use it as your primary 'working' storage - somewhere that you can refer to,
search and revise from, but you should also create a backup that can be placed
somewhere safe. Hard drives, for all their day-to-day reliability, only need
one bad moment to lose everything, and once it's gone it'll cost a lot of money
to get back if you haven't made proper backups.
The choice of an external hard drive may,
in many ways, be a better option than a normal internal one - especially for
students. Not only do they have all of the capacity and cost benefits of normal
hard drives, but they're also portable.
It's true that the transfer speeds to
external hard drives aren't quite as good as with internal ones, so for that
reason it's not recommended that they be used to store a large amount of data
in one go. The time it'd take to fill them up would rapidly become
inconvenient. Rather, external drives should either be used for systematic
archiving (in particular, storing incremental backups) or as a portable medium
for files too big to be comfortably transferred by any other method.
One thing worth pointing out is that
external drives are slightly more prone to damage and data loss, for the simple
reason that they spend a lot more time being moved around than internal drives,
and they're more likely to be de-powered mid-write. Admittedly, these factors
affect all portable storage devices, but they affect external hard drives
without any specific benefits in return.
Hard
drive and SSD prices are falling again. Phew.
SSDs
The increasingly popular, decreasingly
expensive Solid State Drive (SSD to its friends) is becoming a more and more
attractive accessory for any computer owner. Compared to hard drives, they are
smaller in capacity and more expensive per-gigabyte, but are also faster,
quieter, cooler, and less power-hungry than HDDs. Again, though, even a small
SSD should prove enough storage for work purposes, so the benefits to having
one need to be looked at from other perspectives.
Price is definitely a factor. If you're
building a cheap PC for a school-goer in the family, or if you're a teenager
being packed off to university with only a student loan to sustain you, an SSD
might prove an unnecessary expense compared to a hard disk. You can buy a 1TB
HDD for the price of a fairly bog-standard SSD, and while they make good
primary drives, they're also a poor choice if you need lots of storage.
The main benefit of solid state drives is
their superior access times. Even the slowest solid state drives will outpace a
traditional hard drive, dramatically reducing read times. You won't just see
file transfers complete quicker and thumbnails load faster, you'll also find
Windows boots in less time, and loading times in games reduced substantially.
The fastest SSDs can even max out a SATA 6Gbps connection.
The question, though, is whether this
counts for much in the wider scheme. Their low power consumption might make
them handy things to put in a laptop to reduce battery drain when working out
and about, but their speed doesn't have any immediate benefits unless you're on
some kind of media course and have a lot of audio or video to process. And
then, that being the case, you'd bump up against the problem that they're much
smaller than hard drives instead, so they're still not ideal.
Data integrity, at least, is good. No
moving parts means that they are even more unlikely than hard drives to suffer
a spontaneous crash, and where hard drive failure rates rise dramatically after
three years of use, SSDs appear to remain steadily low for as long as five.
They aren't good for long-term backup storage, but you can use an SSD as your
primary drive without concern.
The best reviewed SSD brands include Intel,
Crucial, Samsung and OCZ. Note that the vast majority of SSD drives are
2.5" (as opposed to the traditional 3.5" of HDDs) so if your case
doesn't contain a 2.5" drive bay (most don't) you should make sure that
the SSD comes with a drive bay conversion kit, or that you buy one separately.
SSD drives require a SATA connection, and while it is possible to buy an IDE to
SATA converter, this will eliminate many of the benefits of buying an SSD drive
at all.
There
are increasing performance benefits to SSDs
