This post is a part of a six-part series from the white paper "The Measure of an Enclosure-Five Factors to Consider When Choosing External Data Storage". Can't wait to read the whole paper? You don't have to! Read it right here. The paper includes a glossary, charts and illustrations to help explain further.

CONSIDER THE APPLICATION

Lastly, and while certainly not least, you will have to decide or at least note how you are going to be using your external storage. Not all applications of external storage require the most complex interfaces or the fastest speeds available. For example, if you’re backing up your laptop overnight, then you may not need an enterprise- level solution like a SAS host interface connected to your computer in order to do so. A standard USB 3 host interface with rotational hard drives deployed a mirrored RAID configuration, like what can be found in several of our RTX® and RAX® products, will serve most small business requirements.

The advantages provided by a SAS interface, which include transferring data to and from a device by multiple users simultaneously, are not typically needed for most backups, but may sometimes be useful in larger enterprise applications such as online transaction processing.

Furthermore, purchasing SSDs for a backup solution may prove too costly compared to purchasing rotational drives, since an SSD’s blazing speed is not needed if your backups occur overnight or in the background as you work. The capacity of an SSD is also smaller than the average rotational hard drive, and so the cost per megabyte is much higher than that of a rotational hard drive.

In short, you can save yourself some cash and perhaps a few IT headaches by purchasing the simplest solution that covers your bases.

This post is an excerpt from the white paper "The Measure of an Enclosure-Five Factors to Consider When Choosing External Data Storage". Read the complete paper for technology choices and five factors to think about when making a decision on what external drive will work best for your needs.