Data Storage Technologies and User Data Strategy

Data storage technologies have grown exponentially over the years. Average hard drives found in personal computers are now at the terabyte range and beyond. Portable USB hard drives are much the same. With so much disk space available on the average home computer, office systems are expected to share those characteristics. Everyone tends to be a bit lazy in housekeeping their disk space and this is natural. As space becomes cluttered and data becomes bloated, storage becomes unmanageable. In the end, it affects the overall performance of each system. However, the reality is that in the office data belongs on server-based drive sets and not on local workstation hard drives. Local disk storage on workstations becomes more of a liability in office settings—it’s difficult to back up data, workstation drives are less reliable than server based storage disk sets, and larger local drives make it harder to control where data ends up.