Data Storage and Media Information

Data storage options have certainly grown over the years and may be a bit confusing to the average personal computer user. Hard drives, floppy disks, CD’s, DVD’s and Memory Keys give us a variety of storage as well as size options. Before you decide what is best for you, you should know a bit about how they work and how much data they hold.

First things first, how big is my file? Files, whether they are documents, spreadsheets or images are measured in bytes. For example; a character (letter, symbol or space) is considered a byte. If you key "have a nice day" that is 15 bytes (12 characters and 3 spaces). For storage purposes see below: (these sizes are approximate not actual)

· 1 byte = 1 byte
· 1,000 bytes = 1 Kilobyte (KB)
· 1,000,000 bytes = 1 Megabyte (MB) 1,000 Kilobytes
· 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 Gigabyte (GB) or 1,000 Megabytes

A Hard Drive has a starting storage capacity of 800 MB and can go up to hundreds of Gigabytes. It is good for primary storage and you can add on to what you currently have. Backing up to a second hard drive or some type of portable storage is recommended for important data you cannot afford to lose.

A Floppy will hold 1.44 MB, or 1.44 million characters, that’s a decent amount of data. Most computers come with the floppy drive installed and disks are easy to use and transport, a good choice for young students or casual users. When purchased in bulk, disks are about .25 cents apiece.

A Zip Disk has the capacity of about 70 floppies, but the drive does not come bundled in any computer packages, it is external and must be purchased separately. Not as common these days, Zip drives begin at about $120 and go up, the disks are about $10 each.

Now consider a CD, it will hold 600-700MB, it can be built into the computer and CDs are fairly inexpensive, less than $1.00 apiece. You cannot simply save to a CD; you have to have some type of CD burning or writing software. There are CD-R’s, which can be written to only once, and there are CD-RW’s, which can be re-written.

A DVD generally holds over 4GB and they also come in Read and Read/Write format and cost about $3-$5 apiece, and like CD’s, you will need a writing software.

Portable USB Memory Keys, sometimes-called flash drives are very compact, easy to transport and come in all sizes. You just plug them in to a USB port on the computer and save your data to that drive. A 128MB drive is about $40, or you can go big and get 40GB for around $300 (that works out to be about 3-7 cents a byte).

There are many options available for every computer user, decide what is best for you, and always remember, back up the important stuff!