Storage stuff which I use.
Disclaimer
No brands nor manufacturers paid me to write this blog post. It is entirely based on my own experiences.
Introduction
In the ever-evolving landscape of the digital era, our lives have become intricately intertwined with the vast realm of the internet. From streaming our favorite movies and music to capturing precious moments through high-resolution photographs, our reliance on online services continues to grow exponentially. As we immerse ourselves in this digital revolution, the need for robust and efficient storage devices becomes paramount. In this blog post, we embark on a captivating journey to explore the diverse array of storage devices that have become indispensable companions in our quest to preserve, organize, and access our ever-expanding digital world. Join us as we delve into the world of cutting-edge technologies that empower us to embrace the boundless possibilities of the digital age. Get ready to uncover the secrets behind these storage marvels that shape our everyday lives and revolutionize the way we store and safeguard our most cherished memories and data.
Day-to-day use
It is a must-have for you to have an SSD installed in your personal computer. SSDs are faster and more tough than traditional hard drives.
Personally, I use Western Digital drives as my primary boot drive. (In case you don’t know, I am a dual-boot user, this drive will be running Windows. My computer is quite old, it only supports SATA based M.2 interface, which is also called NGFF. This is a 250 GB one, model SA510) My secondary boot drive is a Samsung drive. (It is installed in a portable SSD enclosure manufactured by ORICO. It is a PCIe 3.0 drive, which is NVMe, model PM981a, it is an OEM drive.)
You always need to store your games, music, and other important files, don’t you? And that’s why aside from your boot SSD, it is always suggested to have a secondary data drive in your computer. And the drive, because of the price, it is recommended to use traditional, not that fast, mechanical drives. (aka. HDD. It is a recommended scenario by WDC.)
My computer comes with a 500 GB Western Digital one. It works perfectly fine.
No, Western Digital never pays me even a cent. WD is just my first choice because I rarely run into any problems with them.
Okay I do have problems with them, but more on that later in the next section.
Portable
For portable storage, I have a KIOXIA one.
KIOXIA is separated from TOSHIBA’s storage department in 2019. They have a brand new name and a brand new trademark. They do not belong to TOSHIBA now, but TOSHIBA still controls the company as of now.
My old computer comes with a 128 GB SSD, which is manufactured by TOSHIBA. It died after I used it for like 4 years. (It isn’t dead, just not reliable anymore, it drops power from time to time.)
I bought that just a few days ago, to replace my old Western Digital mechanical drive.
The WD drive is WD10SPZX, so 1 TB 2.5" drive. It is good enough, but I love to bring my drive everywhere, so mechanical drives… It’s just not good enough for me.
I have had a Western Digital My Passport Ultra removable drive. I think I purchased it way back to the year of 2015. I always carried it everywhere and dropped it sometimes. So just a few months ago, it completely died. To be fair, it’s not the problem with WD, it’s the problem with myself, honestly. Like, mechanical drives CANNOT be dropped, and I’m still happy that I successfully pulled most of the data out of it and let the drive rest in peace.
All my large storage devices are from Western Digital before I purchased this drive, this time I decided to purchase the other brand, which is KIOXIA. The model specifically is EXCERIA G2, it is a 1 TB one. I bought that because it is very cheap. The brand new one costs only ¥289, with free shipping from the reseller. It is nearly the same price as the mechanical drive!
I installed it into an SSD enclosure by ITGZ, a Chinese company. The controller is RTL9210B, it can work with both NGFF and NVMe. It supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) and UASP. The ORICO one mentioned earlier is the same, but it is RTL9210, which only works with NVMe drives.
Aside from the large storage one, I also have a lot of thumb drives and SD cards. (SD cards will be mentioned later in the photograph section)
The most reliable one I have used is the DataTraveler 3.0 by Kingston. I only have a 32 GB one, I use it as my rescue drive. (I installed Ventoy on it, I can boot to any ISO images I want.) It is rock solid, and I’m pretty happy with it.
I also have some random TOSHIBA transmemory drives. It is USB 2 and it is only 8 GB. I only use it for my Tails distro, which the whole system will run on RAM, the requirements for the flash drives aren’t too high.
Photographing
I am not a photographer, not even an amateur one. I’m going to talk about SD cards, which I think photographers will use more frequently than anyone else.
I have a LOT of random SD cards, I have a lot of 2 GB, old microSD cards, and even a 128 MB one. They are mostly by SanDisk.
I mainly use a 128 GB Samsung microSD card, model EVO Plus. It is a UFS-I card, and it is rock solid. I also have a 16 GB SanDisk card, it is just a normal Class 10 card, but it’s okay and I trust SanDisk for their quality.
Off-site backup
The 3-2-1 principle should never be forgotten. Cloud storage is the choice for most average people, and here’s the cloud storage services I use.
Microsoft OneDrive. I do pay them for the Family plan with my friends, I get 1 TB extra storage and Office suite. I also signed up for their E5 Developer subscription, which is free to use. I got 25 accounts, each account gets 25 TB of OneDrive storage, and I also get the Office suite, the subscription is “Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise”. Seems pretty cool and that’s my main storage for now.
Google Drive. I have paid them for a couple years now, I paid for Google Workspace before, but then I realized it is not a good idea to work with Google while I already have an existing workflow with Microsoft. So I cancelled that and switched to only subscribing to Google One, for only personal use. I use Google Photos really often, and that’s where my photos and videos go. I pay them only a few bucks a year, and I get 100 GB storage. It works well for me.
A server hosted off-site. Most people don’t need this, but I do have a server which is far away from me. It is even a dedicated server. It is hosted in Kansas City, MO, US. I rented them from NOCIX. (formerly known as Wholesale Internet) I pay them 15 bucks a month and the spec of the server is not amazing. Anyways, this is my main file exchange (I will upload my files to the server and the server will compress, encrypt, and upload these files to several cloud storage services. That’s how I managed my files) and torrenting machine. Also, this is the main backup server of all my servers (I installed Proxmox Backup Server on it). It has a /29 IPv4, which I get 5 usable addresses to use. This is useful for me, but not for you. It’s worth sharing the storage of this server. As I said earlier, the server is quite old. So the boot SSD is SanDisk SDSSDP12, a 128 GB SATA SSD, and the storage is a 2 TB TOSHIBA DT01ACA2. Both of them have been running for over 80k hours, but it is still running perfectly fine, and I’m happy with it.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, everyone should pick the storage devices and services which suit them best. Above are mine, for you to reference.