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Yogesh Kamat
Ask ten experts how to build a “digital home” and you'll likely get ten different answers. Some will tell you to focus on applications: security, photo slideshows, music streaming, TV recording, and so on. Others will tell you to focus on building a solid, high-speed network or making sure your multimedia gadgets support this or that type of content. Especially for novices, it can all be a bit overwhelming.
We can't tell you what approach is best; the balance of planning priorities varies from home to home. We can tell you that one of the most commonly overlooked but crucial aspects of any digital home is storage.
 Why Storage Matters
Many of us grew up on word processing and spreadsheets, back when 20 megabytes of disk storage seemed vast. But then came multimedia, and now 20 gigabytes seems uncomfortably cramped. Our world now has CD ripping, file sharing networks, download services, digital cameras, and affordable DV camcorders. A CD ripped at high fidelity settings in MP3 format might consume 80MB. The same album downloaded from a music subscription service (at slightly lower fidelity) would chew up about 45MB. A conventional 5-megapixel (MP) image captured in standard-compression JPEG format takes up roughly 1MB. And one hour of uncompressed standard video consumes over 14GB of disk space. Want to use your computer or similar TiVo-like device to record your favorite TV show? At DVD-quality recording, that's about 2GB per hour. Going high-def will multiply that by more than six times.
You can run the numbers for yourself, but with a relative handful of CDs, downloads, and video, it's apparent that dozens if not hundreds of gigabytes of storage space are needed. If you're still devoted to your VHS tapes and film camera, accept that the world is now running in the opposite direction. Digital now outsells analog on almost every media front, and some old school analog titans are closing plants left and right. Especially if you have broadband, there are literally terabytes of data flowing through your home like a river, and all you need is the storage solution to dip in and have your fill. The trick is to have the right solution to ensure you have enough storage and the right level of data protection so you can manage that content easily and keep it safe.
Fortunately, reputable companies offer a suite of reliable storage solutions at affordable prices. So yes, there are lots of ways to tackle a “digital home,” but all of them depend on having plenty of storage capacity, with the right management tools, planted at the right places across your home network.
Storage Hotspot #1: The Primary PC
The average capacity for a new PC's hard drive may still be under 100GB, but this size is really more pertinent for a user with a system holding an operating system and a handful of applications and documents. In a digital home, the rule for a primary PC is to buy as much storage capacity as you can afford because, trust me, you'll grow into it. But there are a couple of caveats.
First, the mistake that most consumers make is to buy the biggest hard drive they can afford and nothing else. Capacity is great but not if it means sacrificing data protection. With two hard drives in a computer, you have the ability to set up and use the second as a periodic backup location, or set up both drives in a “mirrored” configuration. In technical circles this is called a RAID 1. In essence, whatever gets written to the primary drive is immediately mirrored to the second. Because the second drive is more or less invisible to the system, your two 250GB mirrored drives still yield only 250GB of visible storage, but if anything happens to the first drive the second automatically kicks in so you have no down time and zero loss of data. Experienced computer builders can help you with setting up a RAID 1 in your PC, again assuming that it has two disk drives of [equal] capacities.
For those users that do not want to break open their PC and install another hard drive, a simpler route is to use add an external hard drive that plugs directly into the computer's USB or FireWire port. Many external drives come with the ability to add storage space and back up a computer's data, but it's important to choose a solution with integrated software backup capabilities and not one with software just thrown in the package as this can make set up more difficult.
Speaking of backup, every heavily used computer should have adequate backup provisions. If this computer houses your priceless family photos and videos, isn't the cost of a second hard drive, whether internal or external, ultimately negligible? Moreover, if you depend on this computer for income, homework, or mission critical recordings like the Super Bowl, do you want to risk drive problems at the worst possible time, including the infamous “disk full” error message?
That said, as you continue to amass multimedia content, some files will prove to be higher priority than others. This is where an external storage solution can also come in very handy. You might have one external for extra storage and another for backup, or one large external might serve both functions.
Also consider the role of extra drives for housing secondary content. For instance, say you shoot 100 images of the family reunion, and ten of them turn out to be excellent shots you edit and share around. Those other 90 might come in handy someday, but they're not important enough to tie up space on your primary drive. The same might be true of TV shows you watch and want to save but perhaps not revisit for a long time. An extra drive is a great way to keep secondary content within reach and not slow down or increase wear on your main drive(s) in the process.
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