The cutest and the current rage on the popularity charts, is undoubtedly the USB drive.
Their varying shapes give them an aesthetic appeal.
Extremely small size (about an inch), makes them ultra portable.
Large on storage, this pint-sized champ can tank up on 16 gigabytes of data. Apple’s iPod packs a cool 60 gigabytes.
Durability is a way of life. Soak it in water or let it jack-knife into a 10-foot drop, dust or magnetic fields, this dwarf brushes them aside, as if nothing happened!
No internal moving parts and, therefore, almost nil wear and tear.
Cheap on the pocket and maintenance is a breeze, since they consume a near starvation diet of 3-5 volts of electricity.
God, they are everywhere. ‘Show me the empty USB port and I shall show you the USB drive’ is a popular slogan, as consumers are now clamouring for more USB drive ports on their electronic devices, to accommodate more of these resourceful fellows.
The forgivable imperfections of this data backup device are its currently slow data transfer rates (around 30 megabytes per second), low number of read / write cycles (which result in a short lifespan) and its great potential for being misplaced / lost (that isn’t its fault, is it?).
It will be a long time before the competition can write its requiem.
The most tired of them oldies is the floppy disk. Long before the ugly duckling hard disks became coveted, these sleek plastic cases and their magnetic film storage media, stood in as substitutes for the hard disk! That was then.
Low storage capacity (an abysmal 1.44 megabytes!)
Affected by dust, dirt, water, magnetic fields, less than delicate handling and weather (the only thing left is verbal abuse), leaves a lot to be desired.
Nowadays, the floppy drive is virtually extinct.
Many a business would swear by them. They are idolized and have not let down their believers, since their debut in 1951. The venerable tape drive is the grand daddy of the data backup devices.
Old timers have painfully witnessed the slow access speed of tape drives, because of the sequential read/ write method i.e. one behind the other. All that is past, because current tape drives transfer data, faster than hard drives, at about 120 megabytes per second.
Vulnerable to magnetic fields and the wear / tear of internal moving parts like rollers etc., yet they are highly dependable for data storage.
Tape drives have a shelf life of around 30 years, while generations of other storage devices regularly make their entrance and exit.
The gigantic storage capacity of 800 gigabytes is only second to the hard drive’s storage capacity. But tape drives are the cheapest, bit for bit, in comparison to other storage media, for voluminous storage requirements.
The time required to back up huge amounts of data is quite high.
External hard drives are among the most popular in the category of storage / backup devices. They have also had a long history like the tape drive and the fixed hard disk. In fact, they are the portable ‘plug and play’ version of the fixed hard disks inside your computer.
Blistering data transfer speeds (480 megabytes per second) make it the speed king of the circuit.
Storage capacities are bordering on previously unimaginable capacities of 2 terabytes.
Porting this mass of data is a cinch. Look for an USB port and just plug it in.
Though more resistant than the internal hard drive to jolts and shocks, the external hard drive can pack up if improperly handled or exposed to dust, heat, moisture and magneto-electric fields.
Micro motors spin the recording spindles and moving read / write heads are causes of mechanical fatigue.
Due to its large storage capacity size and extremely short life span of 3-5 years, a data loss problem is a reality and requires expertise for recovery.
‘Compact Disc–Read Only Memory’ (CD-ROM) drives or ‘Digital Versatile Disc–Read Only Memory’ (DVD-ROM) drives are examples of optical drives.
Optical drives do not match the storage capacity of a tape drive or external drive (capacity ranges from 700 megabytes to 8.5 gigabytes).
Extremely cheap. But cheap dyes in the storage medium can endanger access to the stored data.
With a shelf life of between 10 to 100 years, imperviousness to dust, magnetic fields or water, optical drive media are definitely durable.
The wide usage of optical drives only adds to its portability. The small footprint of the storage media allows for extreme stackability i.e. 850 gigabytes of storage space in an area of half-an inch!
Optical drives use tiny internal motors and sensitively positioned read/ write heads, which make them susceptible to mechanical failure and physical shocks.
The choice is clear. Leave out the floppy.
James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk
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