Out of disk space? Storage options for your media

Paul Butland, 32, is a hoarder. This being 2013, his hoarding takes up almost no physical space, but his digital home is stuffed to bursting with junk he never uses.

“I started by ripping my whole CD collection years ago, and I’ve never really stopped,” he explains. “Right now, I have around 120GB of music on my hard disk, and – I probably shouldn’t say this – thanks to BitTorrent, my movie and TV collection is about ten times that. I also keep all the raw photos I take, which I don’t really need to do, and I’ve no idea how big my games library is right now. It’s pretty big.”

Paul might sit at the bulging end of the hoarder scale, but his situation isn’t unusual. The rise of one-click downloads, fibre internet connections and hard disks with capacities in the terabytes have combined to make us blasé about what we accumulate on our PCs. This was fine until SSDs came along and forced us to think once more about what we’re storing.

I started by ripping my whole CD collection years ago, and I’ve never really stopped

A new laptop purchase can induce a headache. A MacBook Pro with 768GB of flash storage will set you back £560 more than the 256GB model. Back in the real world, most people’s budget for an Ultrabook is unlikely to stretch beyond a 256GB or even a 128GB SSD, which isn’t nearly enough for someone like Paul.

His headache worsens in mobile, where every tablet and smartphone comes with its own bundled dilemma: how do you decide which parts of your music collection you’ll want to listen to?

While we wait for SSD capacities to catch up with our excesses, there are ways around the problem. In this feature, we’ll look at the pros and cons of a variety of alternative storage options, from the simplicity of an external hard disk to the always-on convenience of the many cloud services set up for just this kind of scenario. So, don’t bin that back catalogue just yet.

External hard disks

An external hard disk is the most basic storage solution. It can sit in a drawer and gather dust before being whipped out and plugged in when a file is needed. It’s most suitable for bulk-storing a single user’s media collection, and for a straightforward dump of excess data, it’s hard to beat.

The key things to look for when choosing a drive are the capacity and the connection: we’re dealing with huge amounts of data, so it’s essential to get one with USB 3 for the best possible transfer speeds (provided you have a USB 3 port on your laptop, of course) and compatibility with a wide range of devices.

We recently compared the performance of a LaCie Rugged drive using USB 3 and USB 2, and the results were emphatic. Copying a 5GB folder to the drive took 4mins 15secs over USB 2 and 1min 56secs over USB 3; reading a 1GB set of photos from the external drive took 42 seconds over USB 2 and 19 seconds via USB 3; and the maximum measured transfer speeds were 116MB/sec and 42MB/sec respectively.

Switching to Thunderbolt only saw slight performance gains, so unless you use only MacBooks, we’d recommend sticking with USB 3 drives – particularly since they’ll also work with USB 2 devices.

The days of needing desktop drives for large capacities of data are long gone. Today, you can buy 2.5in external disks that hold up to 2TB, and the prices are falling all the time. Our A-Listed 2TB Western Digital My Passport with USB 3 from Amazon will set you back £100 (all prices inc VAT), with 1TB drives dipping as low as £58. If you don’t mind a bulkier 3.5in model, you can get a 3TB Seagate drive for only £84.
That may be overkill. When you’re replacing an existing laptop or PC, it’s often more cost-effective to recycle its hard disk. Just open up the case and unscrew the drive, then slot it into a USB 3-equipped enclosure to turn it into an external drive. Icy Box’s 2.5in enclosures start at £13 at Scan; 3.5in desktop drive enclosures start at £22.

Finally, if you have multiple spare hard disks lying around, a direct-attached storage dock may be more convenient. Keep your hard disks carefully labelled and ordered, and simply slot them one at a time into a dock such as the Dynamode USB-HDK-3.0 (£20) to access the files immediately without the need for enclosures.

If one slot isn’t enough, the Sharkoon QuickPort XT Duo accepts two drives at once. If you do go down this route, be sure to protect your bare disks from dust and direct sunlight when they’re not in use.

As for keeping your collection safely stored externally, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping all the files onto the new disk. By default, the Windows Libraries point to the standard locations on your primary hard disk, so you’ll want to direct them towards the external disk.

Open an Explorer window and expand Libraries in the file tree, then for each of Music, Videos and Pictures, right-click and select Properties. This brings up a list of the folders to which the Library currently points; it’s a matter of clicking the Add button and navigating to the relevant folders on your new external drive. From then on, every time you connect the disk, your media will appear in your Windows Libraries, and you can safely delete the local files.

You can direct Windows to assign your external drive the same drive letter every time it’s plugged in. Follow the instructions on the Microsoft website.

As simple as it is to set up, there are major downsides to relying solely on an external hard disk, not least the lack of protection for your data. That single external disk now holds the only copy of much of your media collection, so it’s vulnerable to disk failure, theft or damage.

There are several additional solutions – such as also sending your files to the cloud or network drives, both of which we’ll come to – but you could simply buy two external disks and set one up as a duplicate of the other.

Windows has a built-in utility for this: in Windows 7, it’s called “Backup and Recovery”, but in Windows 8 you’ll have to open the Windows 7 File Recovery tool from the control panel and click “Set up backup”.

From there, you can choose your destination drive – the second of your two external hard disks – and choose the files you want to back up, which will be the media collection you just copied onto the first drive. Choose a regular time and day to perform the backup, and that’s it; just make sure you have both drives plugged in at the right time, or the backup will fail.

Trust the cloud

Data loss shouldn’t be a problem for our next option. Storing files in the cloud has never been easier: generally, it takes a quick sign-up and a few clicks to select the folders to include. It’s never going to be a fast solution, with the initial upload potentially taking hours or days on an ADSL broadband connection, but once it’s up there, it’s backed up and safe from harm – hopefully.
However, actually using the cloud for our needs requires several different accounts on several different clouds. We’re not looking for a simple online backup, ready to be restored should anything go wrong; we want an accessible collection of music, videos and other files, so we can keep using our computers like we did before we made the step up (and down) to an SSD.

You’re well covered when it comes to storing music, as we saw in a recent feature. Apple was first to realise its phones didn’t have the storage to match people’s collections, so it launched iTunes Match; for £22 per year, this service will scan your library, convert every matched track to a 256Kbits/sec AAC file and make them available online via any iOS or iTunes-compatible device. The limit is 25,000 tracks, enough even for a heavy user such as Paul.

Amazon’s platform-agnostic Cloud Player Premium will match 250,000 tracks for the same price, but neither service can top the value of Google Play Music: it matches 20,000 tracks for free.

These services are ideal for offloading the storage of a large music collection to the cloud, and they’re effortless to set up and use. Just bear in mind that access is tied to your subscription in the case of Apple and Amazon; make sure you redownload your entire collection to local storage before you cancel.

There are so many options to choose from for storing documents. Depending on your platform preference, you could make use of the free storage services offered by Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive or Apple iCloud, all of which come with extra features such as online editing and calendar syncing. None of them can match the cross-platform simplicity of Dropbox, however. Sign up for the free 2GB account, then perform some simple setup tasks for a further 500MB; referrals and photo uploads can boost that to as much as 18GB.

To maximise value, make use of multiple free storage services at once. That might sound like a pain, but the free Jolidrive does an impressive job of gathering everything you store in the cloud into one clean (although read-only) browser interface. It currently supports Box, Dropbox, Google+, Google Drive, Facebook, SkyDrive, Ubuntu One and several media services, such as SoundCloud and Flickr, with more promised.

The one gaping hole in our cloud-storage strategy is video. There’s no video equivalent to the various music-match services, and the kind of capacities required means you’re going to have to shell out a monthly or annual fee to upload and stream such large files to a storage service. Many good video-streaming solutions are available, but they don’t actually store the files – you still need a hard disk from which to stream. For heavy users, local storage still wins out, which brings us to our final option.

NAS devices

Network-attached storage (NAS) gives the best of both worlds: the capacity of local storage with the freedom of the cloud. A NAS has huge advantages over a simple external hard disk.

It can store and serve up different files for multiple users; you can mirror your data to safeguard against disk failure by using multiple disks in a RAID array; and today’s NAS devices can host shared printers, support a network of IP security cameras, and stream media to compatible devices on the network or over the internet. Wherever you want access, a NAS is your always-on media provider.
The downside of using a NAS device is that it must be switched on and connected to the network at all times, which means noise, heat and a steady flow of pennies onto your electricity bill.

If your router is in the living room and your NAS is Ethernet-only, there isn’t much you can do except run a long cable to house the device in a less used part of the house.

Happily, more and more NAS devices offer Wi-Fi connections, and they’re also getting steadily quieter and more power-efficient. For example, our current A-List NAS device, the Synology DS213air, has both Gigabit Ethernet and 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless.

This helps with more than only placement. You can connect directly to the device’s Wi-Fi and set up your disks however you want them, without running any setup software on your PC or laptop first. If you have cable broadband, you can even use the DS213air as a wireless router, albeit a fairly basic one.

As for performance, you won’t quite achieve the speeds of a direct connection to a USB 3 external hard disk, but a good NAS device won’t be far off. When we tested the DS213air, we measured a peak transfer speed of 71MB/sec over Gigabit Ethernet, which is almost twice as fast as our test USB 2 drive.

Of course, if you set up your NAS to connect wirelessly, you’re sacrificing performance for the sake of convenience: we copied files to the DS213air at 13.2MB/sec at close range, which dropped as we moved to other rooms in the house.

The biggest strength of a NAS device, however, is one that no other home storage solution can match: a huge capacity that’s always ready for use. All good NAS devices work as iTunes and DLNA-certified media servers for easy streaming to a huge array of connected devices; either use the bundled software, or direct iTunes or another utility towards the media folder on your NAS. Other features can include integrated Eye-Fi support – which allows supported cameras to send photos directly to storage via Wi-Fi – connections to sites such as Flickr, a BitTorrent client for downloading without a PC, and even mobile apps to access files on the move.

Many NAS devices also allow remote access from anywhere with an internet connection, which is great for travelling users.

So, what’s the catch? If NAS devices are now so simple to set up and offer such a convenient experience, why aren’t we all using them?

The main reason is the cost. The Synology DS213air will set you back £234, and that’s diskless. Wired alternatives are available for less, but you won’t find many two-bay diskless NAS devices for less than £130.

Take your pick

Before you choose a storage solution, you should know just what it is you want to achieve. We’re not talking about backups, but rather potentially splitting an extensive media collection across multiple locations, so that your SSD has to hold only the necessary basics – perhaps a manageable slice of your music and video collection, plus core software and files for daily use.

Also, bear in mind, that the best approach may not be one of the options in this feature, but rather a combination of all three. It may seem counter-intuitive to split your data, but the convenience of the cloud makes it simpler in practice than it sounds.

So, work with whatever hardware you have to hand, and plan the rest based on the size of your collection, your day-to-day need – and your budget.