Five affordable ways you can store more data
Running out of data storage? You’re not alone: recent
research has shown that a truly staggering 90% of all data has been created in
the last two years. So, in short, we’re constantly creating more and more data
which, in turn, means we need more and more places to store it.
The problem is that storage media can be expensive,
particularly if you don’t know what you need. Walk into an electronics store
and tell them you need more memory, for example, and they may well start
extolling the virtues of SSDs which, whilst extremely quick, are anything but
cheap.
Put simply, unless you need or are willing to pay for
exceptional read/write speeds, you can bolster your data storage significantly
for less than £50. With this in mind, here are five types of storage media that
boast significant capacity, yet cost less than what you’d normally pay to fill
up your car’s petrol tank:
Hard Drives
A 2TB hard drive can be purchased for just over £50, that’s
just two and a half pence per GB.
The drawback here is that these are internal drives meaning
that you’ll either need to fit them into your machine or buy a hard drive array
and set this up, both of which can be tricky. Yes, you could pay someone to set
it up for you but this, possibly coupled with the need to buy a hard drive
array, would make things expensive.
External Hard Drives
For roughly the same cost of a 2TB hard drive, you could
instead purchase a 1TB external hard drive.
Yes, you’ll get half the storage capacity, but the cost per
GB is still extremely competitive at five pence. Plus, these drives are easy to
setup and maintain, making them an excellent way of substantially increasing
the amount of data you can store with a minimum of fuss.
USB Drives
If you’re not in need of a device that can store vast
amounts of data, we’d strongly recommend a USB drive. These seemingly
ubiquitous devices offer relatively high capacities and, whilst their cost per
GB of storage is relatively high (roughly 30 pence per GB), this is offset by
the relatively low cost of the devices themselves.
SD Cards
They’re commonly associated with digital cameras but SD
cards can be used to store all kinds of data and, if you’re not in the market
for a high-capacity piece of storage media, are viable alternatives to USB drives.
The Cloud
Ok, we’re sort of cheating a
little bit here: all of the devices we’ve mentioned previously incur a one-off
fee whereas cloud storage – which allows you to store your data remotely – requires
users to pay a moderate annual or monthly fee.
If you only require a small
amount of additional storage, though, you could get it for nothing with a cloud
storage provider, many of whom allow users to create an account that affords
them two to five GBs of storage for free. Should you then need more storage,
you can easily upgrade at any time.
Remember that all devices can fail
so, just in case you ever need a data recovery service, click
on the link and bookmark the page to quickly book a free diagnostic on any
failed media.