Which kind of storage media should I use?

 

What sort of storage should I use?

 is one of the most frequently asked topics at Macrium Software. This may appear to be a simple question at first glance, but the more you look into it, the more complicated it becomes. You can decide what sort of storage is appropriate for your requirements by considering the benefits and downsides of each storage medium. We'll look at some of the most prevalent storage media today.

Archives and backups

 One factor to consider when selecting storage media is if it will be used for archiving or backups. A backup is a copy of data that may be used to recover in the case of a disaster (usually kept in a different place). An archive may be thought of as a collection of long-term records created to save data in the event of a future need for historical information. Archives are often retained for more than 5 years, whereas backups are updated throughout time and are not typically kept for this long.

 Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) may be found almost anywhere. These can be found in servers, personal computers, laptops, and gaming consoles.But how do hard disk drives function, and why are they so popular? HDDs read data from one or more rigid spinning disks covered with magnetic material using two or more magnetic heads mounted to a moving arm. For a variety of reasons, magnetic discs are quite popular. When compared to other storage media, HDDs are very inexpensive. HDDs also have a long lifespan, making them a versatile storage medium. Moving components, on the other hand, will degrade with time and can be destroyed if the disc is jolted.

SSD (solid-state drive) 

(SSD) Solid State Drives (SSDs) are quickly gaining traction as the preferred local storage solution. Solid-state drives (SSDs) function by storing permanent data on microchips (Flash Storage). SSDs, unlike HDDs, don't have any moving parts and don't have a physical disc within. SSDs outperform HDDs in terms of performance since they don't need to wait for a reading arm to physically access data. However, this performance boost comes at a higher price and with less storage for your money. As a result, SSDs are great for booting up an operating system and storing 'hot data' (smaller amounts of data, accessed more regularly, e.g. work documents). The SATA interface was the first to be used with SSDs, as it was the standard for magnetic discs at the time.This allows an SSD to be used as a direct replacement for magnetic discs, but because it is built around a data stream from a small number of magnetic heads, it does not fully use an SSD's superior bandwidth and parallelism. NVMe was created to address this by better matching the performance characteristics of SSDs. The physical layer is PCIe, with either a U.2 (which has yet to gain popularity) or a more common M.2 (which has yet to gain traction). An NVMe storage device can also be directly incorporated onto a PCIe expansion card. There have been concerns about flash storage's long-term viability, particularly since charge carriers (electrons or holes) are lost (detrapped) through the tunnel oxide

Magnetic Tape (Magnetic Tape)

A thin, magnetised coating on a plastic sheet is commonly used to make magnetic tape. Magnetic tape isn't as popular as it once was, but new magnetic tape drives are continuously being manufactured. Writing to and reading from magnetic tape requires costly gear. The magnetic tape drives themselves (which are generally in the form of cartridges) are inexpensive once this hardware has been acquired. These cartridges may also store a lot of information (up to 15TB)

Dye-based optical media

The magneto-optical drive is a now-rarely observed version of optical media. A ferromagnetic substance was encased inside a plastic shell in these devices. Based on the magneto-optic Kerr effect, a laser is then utilised to read data from the magnetic disc.  The limited maximum capacity of magneto optical discs (256MB to 9.2GB) made them ineffective for storing huge amounts of data. The magneto-optical discs had a long life and were extremely dependable, but they were eventually surpassed by less expensive optical media and flash memory systems.

Cloud

Cloud storage is a rapidly expanding storage medium. This is accomplished by sending your data across the internet to data centres owned and maintained by the service provider you selected. Because data is delivered through the internet, the speed of the transmission is dependent on your network and might be slow. This also implies that if your network connection is lost, you will lose access to your data in the vault.At such data centre, redundant copies of your data are frequently kept (and potentially other data centres around the world),This also implies that your ability to keep data in the cloud is dependent on the service provider; if they decide to shut down the service, you will lose access to your data. As a result, it's hard to say how long this storage media will last. However, because your storage is managed by a service provider, you have the flexibility to choose different solutions based on your requirements. Amazon Glacier, for example, is meant for preserving 'cold data,' but Amazon S3 is for data that is accessed more often. This is mirrored in the pricing: Amazon Glacier is less expensive per GB of data stored, but there is a retrieval cost.