When you’re wanting to store the latest trance music like tracks from Above & Beyond or one of their Anjunadeep collections, what are the best storage options? Are you at risk from hard drive failure and what can you do if you start to lose your files through corruption or the drive stops working all of a sudden?
Let’s explore this more to provide some useful answers for you.
Cloud Storage
One approach to take is to store all your media in the cloud. This might be the iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive or Google One. They each have their pros and cons. Limitations on storage and file sizes is a major issue with free accounts on cloud providers though. It’s difficult to access all your tracks online unless you pay for a premium account with a cloud provider.
Even if you have a cloud account, the upload time to copy all your music files to the cloud depends mostly on your local internet speed. If the internet isn’t fast in your area or the quality of the connection is poor, the files may take considerable time to upload. This is especially true if they’re music videos rather than smaller MP3 tracks. Lossless FLAC tracks can easily be half a gigabyte when recorded in high-quality, so music takes up more space and is longer to upload than in the past too.
Using the cloud for music and video content isn’t brilliant in practice.
Solid State Drives
Solid state drives (SSDs) have no moving parts, making them safer to transport. There’s no moving arm with a laser that can get moved out of its correct position. However, while their costs have come down, they’re still very expensive on a per megabyte basis. SSD drive capacities are growing, however, with 500GB and 1TB drives now available.
Of course, their file loading times are impressive, but their storage is limited. For anyone who keeps quite a few albums and videos on their personal storage, it’s difficult to get an SSD solution that can handle the volume.
Hard Drives
Hard drives are perhaps the best storage option when there are more videos of trance music performances than recorded albums. Platter drives provide by far the largest storage capacity on a per drive basis and are the cheapest per megabyte too. They are a little more fragile, so sometimes they can get damaged or worn out from overuse.
In the event of a damaged hard drive, you’ll want to use a hard drive recovery service like the one from Secure Data Recovery. This provides the best chance of rescuing your data from a hard drive that’s failing or failed already, or data that’s started to become corrupted.
It can either be a mechanical failure where a part inside the drive has broken or stopped working as it should or it can be a degrading storage ability where data is getting corrupted over time.
It’s always a good idea to keep a backup of your favorite tracks because hard drives do sometimes fail, even those from the top manufacturers. That way, even in the event of a failed recovery, you don’t lose your most prized tracks!
