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Storage options for data hungry users available

"There's never enough space. I'm always looking for the largest hard drive on the market, and it's never big enough for what I really need to do."

Anton Flewelling, a Virginia-based computer worker

With 120GB hard drives now the norm, the space available may seem huge. But start dabbling in digital video, downloading and storing music in MP3 format, snapping thousands of digital pictures, and attempting to back up all that data, and you'll soon feel the pinch.

Take it from Anton Flewelling, a Virginia-based computer worker whose hobbies include collecting digital video and digital music.

"There's never enough space. I'm always looking for the largest hard drive on the market, and it's never big enough for what I really need to do," Flewelling said.

So what can you do if your data storage needs are outstripping what seems to be available to hold the data?

First, you can add one or more hard drives to your existing system. This is an option only for those with computer cases built to accept more than one hard drive. Smaller minitower units are typically not made to hold more than one hard drive -- many hold a maximum of two.

Even if you have a large tower case, though, capable of holding several hard drives, your storage options are limited by the number of hard drives your system can support. The most popular hard drive interface, known as IDE, supports a maximum of four "channels," with each channel capable of supporting one device, such as a hard drive or a CD-ROM. That means that at most you can install four hard drives in your PC.

In practice, though, at least one IDE channel is devoted to the CD-ROM or DVD drive. If you have both a CD-ROM and a DVD drive in your PC, it's likely that two of the four available IDE channels are used up already, leaving you with two available for hard drives.

So most of us with significant storage needs will look seriously at using hard drives externally -- outside of the computer case. Here, there are several possibilities.

As soon as you consider hooking up an external hard drive to your PC, the main consideration becomes which connectivity standard to use. That's because the speed of the connection becomes all-important. Today, there are only two connectivity standards worth considering: SCSI and Firewire.

SCSI devices, however, are prohibitively expensive and do not offer much if any performance improvement over FireWire, so most people rule out SCSI right away. That leaves Firewire. USB 2.0, another connectivity standard, is attempting to unseat Firewire, but it is a relatively new standard and not well supported yet.

External firewire drives, though, can be hooked up individually, with each drive using its own connection to your PC. Or you can "daisy chain" the drives together, with cables running from the first to the second, the second to the third, and so on. The advantage of daisy chaining is that you use up only one Firewire port on your PC -- only the first drive must be connected.

All others are connected to other drives. An excellent resource for purchasing FireWire kits that allow you to assemble a normal hard drive as an external FireWire unit are available at several places online. A simple "google" search for "FireWire enclosures" will give you a list of many retailers, including the popular FireWire Max (http://www.firewiremax.com) and FireWireDirect (http://www.fire-wiredirect.com).

One possible disadvantage of daisy chaining drives is that each drive will show up as a separate drive to your operating system. This may or may not matter to you. If your current PC contains only a C drive, then the daisy-chained drives will show up as D and E.

Daisy chaining would present a problem if you would like the space available on both the D and E drives to be represented as one drive, so that you could back up a huge amount of data and "span" both drives with one large file. To do this, you must look beyond daisy chaining to a RAID setup.

RAID, short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, is a technology that allows you to employ two or more hard drives in combination. These drives will appear to your system as one large volume. So if you have two 120GB hard drives in a RAID setup, they will appear to your system as one large 240GB drive.
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