capacities. As can be seen elsewhere in this magazine
issue, Seagate has released a new hard drive targeted
at enterprise customers which has a capacity of 8 TB or
roughly 8000 GB.
Solid state drives (SSD) on the other hand, consist of
interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data even
when there’s no power present. SSDs have no moving
(mechanical) components, and compared with electromechanical disks, are typically more resistant to physical
shock, run silently, have lower access time, and less
latency. However, while the price of SSDs has continued to
decline over time, they’re still roughly seven to eight times
more expensive per unit of storage than HDDs, making
them far less common.
Flash storage (or flash memory) refers to the electronic
non-volatile computer storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. This type of storage is
found primarily in things like computer memory, USB sticks,
camera memory cards, etc. as well as being used in SSD
applications as mentioned above.
Example of this type of storage includes popular services
such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Mozy.
There are multiple benefits to this type of storage, but also
some drawbacks too:
Benefits
- data can be accessed anywhere, from any appropriately
enabled device
- scalability: additional storage can be bought and
provisioned as needed
- systems and operating software are usually the
latest versions
- reliable and low-cost backup and recovery due to there
usually being two or three different backup servers located
in different places around the globe
- reduced server and physical storage space costs due to
offsite hosting
Drawbacks
- hosting provider outages can affect business operations
- large data transfer requires decent bandwidth capability
- potential hosting service provider lock-in
- security and privacy concerns
As can be seen, there are many ways to skin a cat when
it comes to storage. Picking the right type of technology
will mostly be determined by industry standards regarding
usage – your camera for example, wouldn’t store its photos
on a magnetic tape cartridge, instead of an SD card.
Nevertheless, it’s a testament once again to man’s ingenuity that not only do so many types of storage exist, but
they are inherently suited to certain uses and technologies,
ultimately benefitting us as the consumers who use them.
Cloud Storage
This type of storage is synonymous with the recent rise
of cloud, and refers to any type of data storage where the
digital data is stored in logical pools, the physical storage spans multiple servers (and often locations), and the
physical environment is typically owned and managed by
a hosting company. People and organisations then buy or
lease storage capacity from the providers concerned.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape_data_storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
http://www.geek.com/desktop-computer-buyers-guide/optical-drive-cd-dvd-blu-ray/ | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage | http://www.gizmag.com/sony-185-tb-magnetic-ta K\