Looking for a storage solution for your computer?
Well, in this video I’m going to discuss 3 popular storage methods and their pros,
cons, price, and help you decide which one is best for you.
Even though you’ll mainly see Macs in this video, these storage options work perfectly
with PCs as well.
Let’s introduce our contenders shall we?
Starting with the cheapest and easiest storage solution, we have the trusty hard drive.
Cheap, slow, with a large capacity, you’re already probably pretty familiar with this,
but maybe not our next option which is an SSD.
SSD stands for “solid state drive”, and it’s huge advantage over traditional hard
drives is it’s speed.
However, it’s capacity is usually more limited due to the more expensive pricing compared
to hard drives.
This brings us to our final option, which is a NAS, or network attached storage.
This bad boy can hold tens of terabytes of data, and is great for data hoarders or simply
those who want to consolidate a whole bunch of hard drives into one place.
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Let’s break this video down into sections, starting with speed.
It’s no surprise that your typical hard drive is going to be quite slow with a read
and write speed of around 100mb/s.
This is because the hard drive is an actual magnetic disk, with a spindle head mechanically
moving around and reading data.
Think of it like a record player.
Hard drives have been around for a long time, and they’re old technology, which means
you can buy high capacity drives for very cheap.
However, the problem is that they’re very sensitive to movement and external conditions
like heat, and are very slow to read or write large amounts of data.
Again, due to them having moving parts.
This is where SSDs come in.
Like the name suggests, they are solid state drives.
There are no moving parts.
This results in vastly increased speed, and the ability to resist vibrations and movement.
Take a look at just how fast they are in this graph.
Even an entry level, budget SSD blows your typical hard drive out of the water.
The great part about SSDs is there are lots of different options.
You can get a budget SSD with fairly good speeds, or go all out on a premium one which
is just as fast as the internal SSD on the latest MacBooks.
Or, you can even make your own.
Check out the video I made on this in the top right corner.
SSDs are perfect for transferring large amounts of data quickly, or even storing high resolution
video footage on to edit in real-time off the SSD itself.
So where does a NAS fit into all this?
If you’re the type of person to download and store movies, or you take a lot of videos
and photos on each vacation and want to keep all that data in one place for example, a
NAS is perfect.
A NAS is essentially an enclosure containing multiple hard drives linked together via software.
You can connect it to your computer using either a network cable or via a wifi network.
You can scale it’s capacity and speed up and down too.
Most NAS setups are built for high storage capacity and are often relatively slow, around
100mb/s - but you can configure it to be super fast as well, up to 1000mb/s with the right
parts.
My current NAS is from Synology and I have a 10GBe network card inside, allowing me to
get a consistent 500-600mb/s read and write speed.
This allows me to keep all of my high quality video footage on my NAS and edit directly
from it.
Let’s move onto storage capacity.
Starting with hard drives, you can get anything from 500mb up to 16TB.
There are a lot of different capacity options and the larger the drive capacity is, the
lower the price per gigabyte is.
SSDs are a little different.
Generally the capacity is smaller, so they often start around 250mb and usually go up
to around 4TB.
You won’t find many people using 4TB or larger external SSDs because of the price,
but they do exist.
Now, a NAS is unique in that you can usually start a NAS at the smallest possible size,
say 2TB, but you’re also able to simply add additional drives to the NAS to increase
storage, or swap out existing drives for higher capacity drives.
I’m using a 6 bay Synology NAS (which I’ve linked down in the description by the way),
which means I could have up to 80TB of storage space if I wanted by using six 16TB NAS hard
drives.
The total storage available depends on your choice of RAID, but I’ll cover that in a
different video.
There are also many different NAS enclosure options, you can get 2, 4, 6 or 8 bay NASs
or even large server-level NASs with tens of drives within them.
So what about pricing?
As we’ve discussed previously, hard drives are very cheap.
Smaller capacity drives are going to cost you next to nothing, while the larger capacity
drives such as 4, 8 or even 16TB are more expensive, but still much cheaper compared
to SSDs.
SSDs can start at the budget level, like a Samsung T5 and go all the way up to a Sabrent
Rocket XTRM Thunderbolt 3.
There are a lot of options in between so you have a lot of choice.
A NAS is similar.
A very basic NAS setup could be as simple as a 2 bay enclosure with 2 moderate capacity
hard drives, all the way up to a specced out 8 bay NAS with eight 16TB hard drives, 32GB
of RAM, and a 10GBe network card.
This allows you to scale the price to your exact needs and budget.
Let’s also briefly mention portability.
Smaller capacity hard drives are relatively small and portable, but like I said before,
they don’t like to be moved or knocked, or exposed to vibrations.
Once you start getting to 4TB and above, the physical size becomes very large and portability
decreases drastically.
SSDs on the other hand are often very small, and can be easily stored in a pocket or card
sleeve in a bag.
You can even velcro it to the back of your laptop screen and use it on the go.
A NAS is unfortunately not very portable at all, however depending on the physical size,
can still be moved with relative ease if you need to move it to another location for example.
Just know that it needs to be fully powered down before you move it.
So which storage option should you choose?
I recommend the hard drive if you’re after a cheap, simple way to expand your storage,
and you’ll be using it mostly to store data on at home.
Don’t get a hard drive if you need it to be portable, or you intend to regularly read
or write large files to it, such as video footage from a camera and speed is also a
factor.
I recommend an SSD if you want to be able to take it almost anywhere such as work or
school.
SSDs are usually very small and portable, and even come in rugged configurations if
you require.
The fact that they have no moving parts means you can even leave it hanging from it’s
cable while connected to your computer.
Their prices are also usually quite affordable, especially if you don’t need the blazing
fast speeds of the premium models.
For example, the 1TB Samsung T5 is only around $120, much less if you can get it on sale.
I recommend a NAS if your total storage requirement is over 4TB.
Once you start getting to this amount of data, it’s much safer and economical to use a
NAS.
You can easily expand storage in the future if you require, and it also adds the option
to store your data safely.
What do I mean by this?
Well, if you’re the type of person to store your data on a single hard drive, if that
drive fails, you lose everything.
With a NAS you can set up a RAID configuration that will spread the data across one or more
drives, so if one drive in your NAS fails, you still have all of your data intact.
If you’re interested in a specific video on my Synology NAS that allows me to edit
high quality 4K and 6K footage in real-time, comment down below and let me know.
But apart from that, thanks for watching this video and I’ll catch you in the next one.