The next time you’re ready to start archiving your important files and you’re scratching around for where to put them, you might end up storing them on another hard disk drive.

If there’s one thing that has been a constant over the last 15 years regardless of what type of computer you own or operating system you run, it’s storage.

Basically, we cannot get enough of the stuff.

The boom in digital media has meant an equal if not greater boom in storage devices to help us keep track of all that stuff.

But the question is how do we archive all that stuff we own? In the past, optical storage far more closely followed hard drive capacities. For example, in 1995, hard drive capacities were basically the same as a single CD-R disc – around 600-700MB. I remember at the time reviewing (and ultimately buying) a 2X-speed Yamaha SCSI CD-R burner when I was writing for PC Magazine Australia back when it was first published in Australia by ACP Magazines.

My office PC, which was pretty quick at the time, had a 750MB hard drive.

But since then, optical media began fall further and further behind. The delay in getting DVD-recordable to market meant that drives had hit 20GB by the time these 4.7GB discs had hit the market. Spool forward to today and Blu-ray with its 25GB write-once discs at almost $1 Australian per GB are as good as we have to compete with 1000GB hard drives.

In fact, there is now no more cost effective way of storing data than to store it on hard drives. In Australia, 750GB Samsung HD753 SATA2 drives sell for around $110. To store that on single-layer DVDs would take 160 discs (give or take), which would cost you somewhere near $80-$90 at market prices. But of course, that doesn’t take into account the amount of time to burn those discs. Even at 16X -speed, which you wouldn’t recommend for burning archive discs, you’d speed at least six minutes per disc or approximately 16 hours solid to burn those discs.

And that’s just a single 750GB drive.

Clearly, the days of archiving serious amounts of data onto optical discs has gone and the best option is to simply store your files on hard drive.

Now there are several ways to do this:

1. Simply add an extra drive to your PC, store your data on it, remove it and then store it in a cool, dry location.

2. Buy an external USB drive and store your files on that.

3. Build a RAID1 array in your PC and store your files there.

4. Build a network-attached storage (NAS) box with at least two drives set to RAID1 and use that as an archive box.

Options 1 and 2 are virtually the same in that they give you a single drive to store data on. That’s not bad but if you’re also using these drives to hold these files so you can make room on your PC for more files, the problem is there is no redundancy.

The biggest problem with storing data is having just one copy of it.

That’s why I recommend at least some form of RAID1 system, either as an array inside your PC (most motherboards today offer at least RAID0/1 options) or external to your PC.

A low-cost NAS box that supports RAID1 is the most cost effective option as it gives you network access to your files without having to chew up your PC hard drives to hold them and it provides an extra degree of freedom in that should your PC blow up, the NAS box will likely still be alive with your files.

What about RAID 5?

RAID 1 basically means that you use two hard drives to keep the storage of one. The second is a direct copy or “mirror” of the first. That’s why RAID 1 is often called “mirroring”. However, it’s not all that efficient if you have to have two 750GB hard drives to keep a back up of just 750GB of data.

RAID 5 is becoming a popular alternative to RAID 1 because it requires only one drive to be used up for data redundancy. For example, if you have four 1000GB drives in RAID 5, you get the storage of three to play with ie. 3000GB. If this was a RAID 1 array, you’d only get two drives or 2000GB to use.

The problem as I see it with RAID 5 is that it’s far more complex and should one drive fail, it’s much harder to replace because of the way the data of each drive is effectively stored on every other drive. With RAID 1, if a drive fails, you replace it with one of equal and greater size and that’s it. Simple. Also, each drive in a RAID 1 array is fully functional. You cannot take a single drive out of a RAID 5 array and use it because it’s data is stored on every other drive in the array.

So if you just want to be able to take a single drive, load it into a system and get your data off it in a hurry, a RAID 1 array is the easiest option to work with.

It only takes a few years of digital video, music and images to understand how much data we all have that we want to keep. DVDs are great for the odd jobs but for archiving on a mass scale, they’re no longer an effective option. The bottom line is there’s nothing that comes as cost effective as hard drives.

Looking after your drives

The two things to remember when storing hard drives is to keep them in a cool, dry location but also to keep them away from magnetic fields. You want to keep them away from large floor-standing speakers, CRT televisions and anywhere near where your vacuum cleaner might go.

Drive reliability – Case Study

If there’s one vendor that has a reason to keep data, it’s Google. And if you dig around on the internet, you’ll find that Google has actually presented some interesting information about their storage farm in terms of the failure rate of their drives. The research Google presented to the FAST 07 Conference in Februatry 2007 is considered one of the largest studies of hard drive failure rates ever conducted.

The research showed that SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) built into hard drives isn’t necessarily a reliable measure or forewarner of impending failure as Google’s experience showed a significant number of drive failures had no noticeable changes in SMART data.

The other most important feature in the research was the fact that if a drive has a scan error, it’s 39 times more likely to fail inside eight months that a drive that has not had a scan error. So basically, if your drive starts exhibiting scan errors, replace it now. It’s not going to get any better and will unlikely see the year out.

Now obviously Google is going to work a hard drive considerably more than you’re going to use one as an archive drive so provided you use a RAID 1 array, that you look after the drives and you use them less than Google uses theirs, you should get considerably more longevity from them.

The golden rule in archiving – redundancy

But in the end, the only important thing about archiving is redundancy. If you only have one copy of something, you really don’t have an archive but a time bomb ticking away that will one day go off. The trick is to back up your most important data onto more than one device, even more than one media if you simply cannot afford to lose it.

It might be a hassle but it’s much better to have too many copies of a file than to have none at all.

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