A Place To Keep All Your Stuff

We Americans seem to have an insatiable appetite for collecting stuff. A casual drive around most any community will reveal a number of different places to keep stuff. Once a sign of luxury, many new homes now have three car garages and perhaps even another unattached out building for keeping stuff. In Harrison alone there are several self storage businesses with room for an RV or just a few boxes of Christmas decorations. How many of your neighbors find it necessary to park their cars in the driveway since their garages are full of stuff?

Well, this proclivity to accumulate stuff has definitely found its way into the digital environment. Not too many years ago most home computer users could keep all the digital stuff on a few floppy disks. Those days are no more.

Even a modest user of a home computer today can accumulate tons of digital “stuff .” Unlike text documents, photographs, audio, music and video files are very large. A single color photograph, when converted to bits and bytes, will not fit on a single floppy disk. That same floppy could have stored a year’s worth of data just ten years ago.

Many of us use several computers in the course of a single day. We may have one at home, use a lap top when traveling and have one or more at the office. With that may “electronic desks” it has become more and more difficult to have access to all the computer files we need…our digital stuff.

There is a new breed of hard drive storage devices on the market which allow very large capacity, portability, security and reliability. Unlike hard drives of the past which failed if you looked at them cross eyed, these drives can be put in your brief case or school bag and be connected to most any computer you choose (PC or Mac) via the USB connection.

There are several manufacturers and a variety of sizes and capacities available. While 500 Gb drive should be more than enough for most of us, if you are a power user or collect lots of videos or movies, a 1 Tb (terabyte) drive might be for you.

A good example of an inexpensive portable drive is one from Iomega. They have a Silver Series 500 Gb drive that retails for about $130. It is about the size of a paperback book and comes loaded with some neat software that will help you use it to back up the data on your desktop computer.

Another leading drive maker, Maxtor, has a drive about the size of a pack of 3” x 5” index cards. It literally can fit in your pocket and it can hold 250 Gb. It is perfect for most home applications. It makes a great back pack accessory for the collegiate set going back to campus this September.

You should see even higher capacity storage devices on the market soon as miniaturization technologies continue to develop. Unlike many sectors of our economy, this one provides better products with more features at decreasing prices.