This is one of those “I remember it just like it was yesterday” stories.
I’m sitting there with my first personal computer, a fledgling IBM PC with two 360-kilobyte disk drives and 64K of memory, and I’m thinking about those “thousands of pages of text” that will fit on “a single 360K floppy disk,” as the advertising copy goes. I feel pretty good, as I cannot imagine needing more than 360K of storage room at a time. Heck, I ought to be able to get by with a single box of 10 floppies for heaven knows how long!
Flash forward (or click ahead, as the case may be) to real time, where, as usual, I’m agonizing about upgrading my newest PC. I have about a “bazillion” megabytes of storage on three hard disks. “Not enough. Not nearly enough,” I fret.
Welcome to the world of “never enough.”
If you’re just moving into telecommuting or operating a home office, you probably have spent hours calculating the amount of hard-disk storage space you’ll need before buying or upgrading your PC. You added up the necessary megabytes of storage for the programs you want to run and then probably threw in a 50 or 100 percent “fudge factor.”
But if you’ve had your PC longer than two weeks, you know that you have woefully miscalculated on the low side, as the next upgrade of your word processing program (say, MicrosoftWord Version 6.0) is being delivered by a moving company in six crates.
Well, I have a partial solution to the stuffed-closet blues. It’s removable storage. After years of filling hard disks, I’ve concluded that no home business system should be without a replaceable storage component. It should be part of your strategy for keeping your main hard disk (the one in the PC) from exploding from overload.
I’m not alone in my like of removable storage.
“The great thing about removable storage is that it allows us to upgrade our computers without taking a screwdriver and ripping into the box. Which, by the way, I won’t do myself,” said Rodney Watkins, an industry analyst specializing in storage systems with the Dataquest Group in San Jose, Calif. (Dataquest is a computer industry consulting and market research firm.)
Before looking at replaceable options, here’s a little information about my strategy-despite my fretting, it has worked pretty well for several years, at least since I moved to the Macintosh universe:
– The hard disk in the PC is dedicated to the system and programs. When upgrading, I get the biggest hard disk I can afford. This leaves plenty of room for program expansion-and, believe me, they will expand. (I just checked my main drive, and there are a couple hundred unused megabytes.)
– The second part of the strategy is an outboard hard drive for data files. This has proved handy for a person who upgrades or changes the main box frequently: get new computer, install system and programs, plug in data hard drive, and away we go.
– Finally, I have an aging, soon-to-be-replaced SyQuest 44-megabyte, plug-in hard drive, which serves numerous functions.
The most obvious is backup. My data files and program files are backed up to various SyQuest-type disks, which fits my “eggs in lots of baskets” school of backup.
“Another great point about removable storage versus a dedicated backup system, such as a tape drive, is its multiuse aspect,” Watkins said. “You can only use a tape drive for backing up your data, but removable storage allows you to use the same unit for back-up, expansion or as the main drive in a pinch, which makes a lot of sense for the home business user.”
I also use a removable storage disk for portability-just like you used to use floppies before files got so huge. A book-length project I’m just finishing, for example, will be delivered to the printer on such disks. The disks also are handy for transporting graphics. I do so little scanning that I can hardly rationalize spending a couple thousand dollrs on a scanner when there’s a shop around the corner that’ll scan for $5 a shot. So I keep my graphics files on removable storage disks.
Third (and relatively infrequently), I use a removable storage disk to isolate a project, especially if I have a ton of material coming in from several suppliers. Sometimes a big project takes up an inordinate amount of space with hundreds of files, and it’s easier for me to lump them in one place.
“If you’re working out of a home office, and you have kids or another user, the removable option allows each user to have their own data,” Watkins noted. “It also allows you an element of security-you might not want your kid to demolish your most recent accounting records while playing `Doom’ on the same computer you use for business.”
If you think your storage strategy could use a removable component, there’s a type of removable medium that will suit your needs perfectly-and, even better, prices are falling.
For the home office user, we can concentrate on three types of removable media: plug-in, hard-drive platters, such as the SyQuest or Bernoulli; magneto-optical disks, which store data on CD-like discs, and PCMCIA cards, conventional (but tiny) hard disks on credit-card-sized devices.
The most common is the ubiquitous disk drive from SyQuest Technologies Inc. in Fremont, Calif., a version of which is made by numerous companies. SyQuest drives come in 44-, 88- and 200-megabyte versions of the 5.25-inch plug-in disk; 105- and 270-megabyte versions of the smaller 3.5-inch plug-in.
It gets more complicated. The older 44-meg drives are dirt cheap, about $250 from any number of mail-order houses. You can get an 88-meg drive (about $425) that reads and writes to a 44. Or the newest, the 200-meg (about $500), that is downward compatible to the 44 and 88 units. The smaller 270 (also around $500) is downward compatible to the 105 (about $325). Iomega Corp. in Roy, Utah, one of the earliest players in the plug-in media game, offers its Bernoulli boxes in 90- and 150-meg flavors ($300 and $500, respectively). Disks range from $50 to $120, depending on the manufacturer, storage capacity and whether you use mail order or buy from the store down the block.
With magneto-optical storage, the drive will cost more, $700 to $1,000, but the disks are less expensive, $50 to $60. The disks are smaller and more durable than a SyQuest-type disk, which is pretty tough in the first place, and hold 128- or 230-megs. Friends who work in ad agencies and graphics shops are crazy about this format because of the disks’ small size and that graphic artists can manhandle them without data loss. (A friend once threw one to me, which I, of course, dropped and managed to kick into a corner. It worked fine.)
By far the most expensive option is PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) cards. These credit card-sized devices, common on notebook computers, can contain a 1.8-inch hard drive in the 100- to 200-megabyte range. The problem right now is that most PCs don’t have a PCMCIA slot, though one can be added for $200 to $300. The disks also are expensive, about $300 to $500.
“Right now, the price isn’t there for PCMCIA compared to other removable media,” Watkins said, “but a Japanese supplier recently showed a regular disk drive/PCMCIA-slot combination that might appeal to desktop manufacturers. If a major supplier includes desktop PCMCIA as standard, it could really drive this market.”
The PCMCIA option will be the most attractive to the road warrior who carries the world in his or her notebook computer. Having the slot on a home PC just provides the same advantages as other removable media.
Though I’m sure a consultant could poke dozens of holes in my storage strategy, it works pretty well for me.
I like the outboard data disk because I can get faster response than with a removable disk. Plus, fast, high-quality outboard disks are available at very little cost for the Macintosh-an Apple 500-megabyte external drive is $525, and you can get a gigabyte of external storage for less than $1,000.
I like the SyQuest drive because I like the idea of multiple backups on different disks. I’ve been able to survive the inevitable hard-disk crashes with little data loss, and, even more important for someone with a home office, without shutting down my system for any length of time. If you opt for a huge disk drive in your computer as the only storage, as did a graphic-artist friend, you run the risk of being down for a long time while data salvagers rummage around in what’s left of the hard disk, trying to find just one more meticulously created, but vanished, illustration.
