These days computer storage comes in many different brands, shapes and sizes, but no matter the marketing pitch or outward appearance modern storage can be categorized into only one of three categories.

• Magnetic media used in conventional hard drives.
• Flash memory used in memory cards, portable devices, and Solid State Drives,
• Cloud storage is any data retained on the internet.

Our choice of devices and services largely dictates the form of storage we adapt, but a conscious effort can be made towards applying the right form of storage for a particular task.

Magnetic Media

Over the last couple of months I have found myself migrating away from magnetic media for primary storage. Slow performance combined with its arcane mechanical properties has relegated magnetic media to the position of backup for which its large capacities are well suited. When I am archiving to one of my two 1TB LaCie Rugged drives the rate in which mechanical media can store and retrieve the data is unimportant as long as the backup is reliable. Magnetic hard drives have been with us so long that their life cycles are widely understood, and even after they fail the methods used for recovering their data are highly developed. In short conventional hard disks utilizing magnetic media make great backup drives because their large affordable capacities are ideal, and their lumbering read/write speeds are not an issue. For primary storage I prefer something a little more modern, and up to 92x faster.

Flash Memory

Flash memory is the future, but the future comes at a price. The cost of flash memory is prohibitively expensive to the point that most people have yet to adopt it in large capacities. Used mainly for portable devices where large capacities are not required, flash memory is preferred for its shockproof resilience and power conscious properties. Only recently has flash memory made an impact on conventional computing. By replacing spinning magnetic media with solid state drives users like myself have witnessed the speed benefits of flash memory first hand and made the conscious decision to overlook the cost when upgrading our computers storage. Today all of my computers a using flash memory as their primary storage. From portable devices like my Pad all the way up to my desktop bound iMac, and Mac mini I am living in the future with read speeds 92x faster than traditional magnetic media. Of course the real future of storage cannot be found on the land but in the cloud where one day data will rain down with the same bandwidth as today's local storage.

Cloud Storage

The era of cloud storage is only just beginning, but people are already taking advantage of the cloud's omnipresent properties by keeping their most important data offsite and accessible from the internet. There is no better example of cloud storage than the gigabytes of correspondence people store with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! email. Google Documents, and Office 365 are showing that people's reluctance to store important documents in the cloud is a thing of the past. SpiderOak and Dropbox are just two of the many syncing services that combine the conventions of the local filesystem with the omnipresent cloud to deliver your files to every computer you re likely to access. Until bandwidth increases we must be content to transmit our larger files in the background waiting for the day where local storage is irrelevant, and everything we need can plucked instantaneously from the storage in the sky.

Cloud storage is the third corner of my storage pyramid. Solid state flash memory provides the fastest primary data access. Magnetic media the most affordable and reliable long term storage, And syncing to the cloud via SpiderOak, Dropbox, and MobileMe are my offsite solutions for data retrieval anywhere in the world.