Storage… and Intel is Dreaming

I finally created another page in the series of advice for fellow non-photographers, this time on storage – which you can find HERE.  I’m not sure if this will wind up being useful to anyone, but at least I’ll have a record that I can laugh at in a few decades about how much effort it used to take to accomplish something so basic like storing photos without the fear of losing them.

I am pretty passionate about this topic, though, so if you have memories sitting in one place, waiting for a technology failure to destroy them, then whether you take my advice or someone else’s, I hope you do something about it!

Intel actually came up with (or sponsored) a rather weird video on this topic, which is posted on YouTube:

Amusingly, Intel’s assertion here seems to be that if you stored all your media content on SSDs, you’d be safer against data loss – and statistics seem to indicate that this is indeed true, as SSDs have lower failures rates (and no moving parts) compared to traditional hard drives. Unfortunately, although the cost of SSDs has fallen very substantially in past years, they’re still vastly too expensive to hold all your media.

I picked up an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (128GB) as a boot drive for my main PC, and absolutely love it. It’s the most substantial speed increase I’ve ever noticed; it’s stunning how much faster it allows your PC to boot. But it cost over $400 at the time, and it’s almost full without storing a single picture or video on it. For media, I have a second, traditional drive. If I aggressively deleted everything I didn’t need, maybe I could get all my content into a 512GB SSD – but those are currently around $1,500 a piece; and pretty soon I’d need two of them. So, nice try Intel, but really not practical.

More disturbing is that even if an SSD is indeed more reliable than a magnetic disk… are you then going to have just one copy of things? Where it’s gone if you accidentally delete it, or get a virus, or if your PC is stolen? Of course not! For $1500, you could store your data on five independent disks plus back it up in the cloud, and have change to spare. Intel should be encouraging a robust backup strategy – not telling you that you’ll be safe if you copy things to a slightly more reliable drive. Especially since destroying your data by accident when you’re trying to transfer it is a very real possibility!