by Pedro Pacheco

Created on: April 06, 2008

Mass storage in computer had evolved more than anything else. Now we have hard disks with 500 GB that are somewhat cheap. I can remember when I had a computer with a huge hard disk of 20 MB. Yes no typos here, just 20 Mb. Now the smallest one has at least, at least, 250 GB.

PEN Drives improved a lot, even more than hard disks. Four years ago I bought a 128 MB PEN for 60. Two weeks ago I bought one PEN with 4 GB for 15. Can you see the difference.

Companies like Maxtor and Samsung keep making hard disks made of steel disks but I believe that in the future this will be not possible anymore. If they wanted they could make a disk of the same GB size but using much less space if it was made of Flash Memory. Imagine an re hard disk made of flash memory. It would be extremely fast and completely silent. I don't see any problem in developing such technology, maybe they are still making a lot of money with traditional storage systems... Anyway, I am looking forward to see a competitor having the courage to take the next step.

$So far if you want to keep all your information safe I don't recommend backups anymore. It takes a lot of time and effort to make backups regularly. You must have a special program just to do that and the amount of information to backup is so much that if you want to find something there, you get lost because you don't have the backup copies indexed.

In my opinion the future and the best way of storing your information on a safe place is to have two hard disks. One will be the one where Windows is installed and all your programs and files. The other will be where you keep all your backup files. Order your backup program to put all the files in that disk. This way you can have access to them all the time, plus you will have that files indexed by Windows or by Google Desktop.

The number of GB a computer has will continue to increase all the time so it's not only important to keep a backup safe but also to keep an index of the backup otherwise it will be almost useless since it will take ages to find the files you want, don't you agree with me? Google Desktop is becoming more and more important.

In the future when we all will have access to internet PENS with unlimited bandwidth and with speeds of 1 GB or even more, I think we can make the backups in the Internet with dedicated companies who make this a business.

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