Well, if you laptop fills up with stuff, what’s the easiest way to handle the overflow? Well, for most folks, the simplest thing remains some that is physical. That is, a USB drive. Now a USB flash drive is nice but a little scary in terms of reliability but is better than nothing, the more reliable solutions is to get:
- USB 3.x to SATA cable. This is about $20. This is a 5GBps solution. If you are lucky enough to USB 3.1 then you have a 10GBps.
- 1TB SSD. This is going to be nice and fast but remember they need to have power applied 1-2 times a year or they will lose all the data stored there.
- 4TB Hard disk for true archival. These are about $80. They are vulnerable to bumps, but they are very stable. You can put them on the shelf for years and they should still work.
Finally, if you want some thing that accessible to more people, then the next solution is a NAS (network attached storage). This requires setup and user names and passwords, so it is harder to get working. Fortunately, the hardware is pretty easy:
- Synology DS214SE. I’ve been using Synology for their software is pretty good and most importantly reliable. The unit costs $200 and then you need a pair of SSDs (for redundancy). A nice solution because with RAID1, if one drive fails, you still have your data.
