We all need more storage, no surprise there. Whether it’s for cloud services, enterprise systems, personal machines, or even phones and/or cameras, there’s just never enough room.

In the early days of the commercialization of the cloud, there was talk that personal storage such as hard drives might become museum pieces and the cloud would solve all, but we know that’s not true considering all the security and celebrity hacks. Not only that, with Seagate recently releasing their 8TB hard drives which have to be helium-filled to reduce friction, and now SanDisk releasing a SD card that is a half-terabyte which is the highest-capacity SD card ever made by far, it appears personal storage is more important than ever.

Small card, big storage

Let’s get some terminology out of the way: SD stands for ‘Secure Digital,’ and it is they type of card you would often see used in larger DSLR digital cameras, although we now have micro-sd cards (that larger one is just an adapter) that are used in everything from phones to tablets to portable game systems. They usually come in sizes like 16 or 32GB, which makes this new one so impressive. Additionally, there is a notational issue we should bring up: GB and Gb is not the same. GB refers to ‘gigabytes’ (remember our discussion of bytes, which are made up of eight bits?), whereas the lower case ‘b’ refers to ‘gigabits.’ That goes for any capacity or speed regardless of prefix, so if your cable company says you’ll get speeds ‘up to 50Mb/s,’ that 50 megaBITS per second, not megaBYTES.

We’ll talk very, very soon about drive sizes and what the future will bring, however it is quite clear that local storage is not going away anytime soon. As I mentioned in class, I have 12 terabytes in my system and I would never entrust that to a cloud service other than my own. Never mind the limitations and security issues of cloud services, with things such as Network Added Storage systems that allow people to set up their own personal clouds and maintain ownership of their own personal files, and have capacities as high as 24 terabytes, or higher if you’re willing to shoulder the expense, personal storage is still the best way to maintain your storage.