What are suggested storage devices for Home user?

Answer 1

That depends entirely on what you're using your computer for, and saying it's a home computer doesn't help much - I can scrounge parts for a fully functional home computer costing 200 dollars or less, using outdated components, or I can spend well over 10 000 creating a state-of-the-art gaming computer that's comparable in computing power to some early supercomputers. (Or, there's my ambition to someday build a computer capable of matching modern supercomputers in my house, but I'm a bit of a tech nut.)

Storage devices available are:

Hard drives - high storage capacity, reasonably good reliability, not the fastest option but hardly slow. An excellent choice for large scale data storage (high definition photos, music, movies, etc), and a good choice for programs.

Solid State Drives - moderate storage, moderate reliability, very fast, very expensive. The best choice for programs, but a poor choice for raw data (you don't need to access data any faster than a traditional hard drive can manage, and you pay more than 20 times as much for an alloted amount of space on an SSD than on a hard drive).

Floppy discs - Technically still an option, but not really viable. Low capacity, low reliability, slow.

CD/DVD/BD - Moderate storage, moderate reliability, not very fast, easily portable, but difficult to overwrite. A good choice for long term data archiving (perhaps that 50 gig collection of music you'll never be able to restore completely if your hard drive goes up in smoke). Requires a read/write optical drive of the appropriate class (DVD/CD read/write drives are around $20, BD/DVD/CD read/write drives are around $100).

Memory cards - comparable to CD/DVD/BD discs, but easier to overwrite. Can be very easy to lose - some are about the size of an average thumbnail. Requires a card reader to access (prices vary significantly).

USB thumbdrives. The same thing as memory cards, but in a larger, less easy-to-lose package, with a plug that allows almost any computer to read it. The most convenient portable storage device available.

Encrypted USB thumbdrives. Some manufacturers make high security thumbdrives that will wipe the data if the incorrect password is submitted a sufficient number of times without a correct logon. Used just like other USB thumbdrives, but only worthwhile for critical documents (bookkeeping, stuff that has government ID codes like social insurance number, etc)

Portable hard drives (or internal hard drives with an external enclosure. Comparable to regular hard drives, but portable, and often significantly slower. There is a special connection called eSATA used for high speed access to external hard drives, but most computers don't have them. High portability - excellent for on-site data backups.

internet data servers - Slow (varying by internet connection, but never faster than operations within your computer), very high data capacity, reliability varies by service provider. Used for long term off-site backups. Possible privacy issues as you're allowing someone else access to your backups.

(A side note on backups - there's no such thing as a foolproof system - your computer can die and it can destroy your data - backups help you recover. Thorough backup plans include on- and off-site backups of varying convenience levels. Your first stage of defense is on-site backup - if the computer dies, you reach into the desk drawer, pull out your backup device, and restore your data. Second is easily accessible off-site backup like, say, a bank safety deposit box. If your house/apartment burns down, the on-site backup is gone, too, but the off-site backup can save you that hassle. Third stage is defense against large natural disasters. A Californian person may want to put their data in Nevada, as Nevada is sufficiently far from the earthquake threat - the primary hazard in California. Someone in Tornado Alley would want this stage of backup outside of Tornado Alley. Internet backup is a more convenient form of third stage backup, but there are privacy issues to consider. You may not feel you need a third stage backup - they're primarily used to store data that is crucial to a company's survival, like design blueprints for an industrial equipment builder, or government documents in the Department of Defense.)

I'd recommend:

An SSD for the operating system and programs. Can be replaced by a hard drive if you're not looking for extreme performance.

A separate, high capacity hard drive, for data. If you have the money, more than one drive in a RAID setup - if one hard drive fails, you don't even need to reach for your backup devices. A "Drobo" is an excellent choice, though they are extremely expensive.

(Note that the data drive and program drive are separate. The drive containing programs has a lot of activity when you're using your computer - it will usually wear out significantly faster than a data drive (in hard use, a data drive will likely have around 100 read-write activities, maybe as much as 1000, in an hour. In that hour, the programs hard drive has several tens of thousands of accesses.)

For backup, I am partial to external hard drive enclosures (shells that convert a traditional internal hard drive into an external drive). They're a little more expensive to start, but they tend to be higher quality, and unlike normal external drives, if you want to use a bigger drive, you don't have to pay the markup for having it external. You can also treat them like very high capacity CD drives and access multiple hard drives individually as you would with a CD.

Optical drives are good for data distribution - most programs that handle burning CD/DVD/BD disks are all capable of creating multiple copies with the user simply changing disks when necessary. The fact that they can't be edited is a major drawback for backup purposes.

Flash drives and memory cards are, in my opinion, only useful for data transportation. If you have more than one computer and they are not set up for file sharing (or if you need these files on a public or work computer), these are your best option. Easily rewritable, easily portable with no extra wires. And, as I said before, encrypted flash drives are an excellent way of protecting critical data.

Sources: a combination of being a computer geek and learning from friends mistakes about data backups.