Gadgetory

today's topic might not be as sexy as graphics cards or CPUs and upgrading it might not wet your panty thumbs but I'm willing to bet that if there was ever some kind of a problem with it you'd be a lot more upset than if your game crashed I'm talking of course about storage now this isn't a hard drive lesson specifically but a little bit of background will help very funny put it back a modern consumer grade hard drive spins it anywhere from about 5400 to 7200 revolutions per minute it's read and write head hovers mere nanometers above a phenomenally sophisticated magnetic platter that generates just about hurricane-force winds as it spins around inside your PC it's basically a miracle so with the mind-blowing complexity of something you can literally buy for about 50 bucks in mind the non miracle here is that sometimes they break raid can help with that we've covered raid before and you can check out those videos here and here but in a nutshell raid uses multiple drives to act as fail safes in case one of them dies but the issue is that each raid array requires multiple drives and while that may work fine in a desktop PC many homes have more than one desktop PC so setting up raids in each of them would be prohibitively expensive and it doesn't help at all to protect the data of devices like notebooks most of which can't hold multiple drives that's where an ass or network attached storage device comes in these handy-dandy little boxes hold anywhere from a single hard drive to a large raid array and act as a safe central storage hub for all of your data and because they're attached via a network rather than a single PC they are always available and they can be accessed by multiple people at the same time they also have their own operating systems that give you the ability to do great stuff like consolidate what would be duplicated files on multiple pcs in one place perform nightly image based backups of your pcs some even support Linux by the way manage your running water downloads access your data from anywhere using a browser or even a mobile app easily share files with others and much much more now hearing that you might say all right some of that sounds kind of cool but if I just wanted to access my data on the go for example why wouldn't I just use Dropbox or something well prepare yourself for some like next-level thinking here because one of the coolest things about an ass or as many vendors are branding it personal cloud is that you can scale your storage capacity on your own terms without paying extra monthly fees there are no data limits other than the ones imposed by your ISP and finally there's no mega corporation overseeing your personal stuff it's all being kept on your own server that actually belongs to you sign me up right well hold on there turbo well basic functionality can be achieved by just about anyone but my mom if the goal is truly worryfree data safety you need to consider the following using an S does not necessarily mean you are doing your due diligence and backing up your data raid is just redundancy which only protects against a hard drive failure backup means two separate copies in ideally different physical locations and can protect you against viruses accidental deletion and many other things that a raid simply cannot an as can be used for backup but that means storing all of the data you want to keep safe on each of the individual computers that you're managing not actually the most elegant solution and one that doesn't really help you consolidate your data unless you're very very organized in an ideal world I'd recommend getting two Nasus one on site and another one doing an off-site replication of your existing knives so all of your data is both easy to manage and safe of course it would be silly of me to suggest that you need to run out and set up the most complicated thing in the world right off the bat many nas solutions allow you to add hard drives and even additional nas units so your storage can continue to grow as your needs evolve feel free to start small I'm just advising you to pick something that can scale so you're able to continue repurposing Hardware rather than checking it and replacing it when you need more so that's an as it's kind of like insurance for your data and like any kind of insurance it's going to be expensive up front and you may never even end up needing some of the benefits but man if you ever do you're going to be happy you have it speaking of happy you guys because I don't have a sponsor for this episode so maybe I'll just take this opportunity to mention five for clothing Dollar Shave Club audible shutterstock and Squarespace as much as you guys might not always be happy to hear these integrations with the number of hours that go into producing this show we would never be able to support it on Google's payout alone and it's only with the help of amazing companies like the ones I just mentioned before that we can continue making this content so just bear that in mind next time you hear us talking about them a thanks for watching guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment with your suggestions for future fast as possible as well as any comments you have on this topic of course and as always tell everyone you know about tech quickie so we can smash that 200,000 subscriber barrier and keep on growing thank you for your support