As we continue our blog series “Has Your Small Business Planned Your Data Storage and Backup Strategy?” that discusses the importance of small business to have a solid plan for their data storage and back-up needs, we wanted to focus this blog entry more on actual local storage of your business data. We want to share some advice on the technology that small businesses who have office space Toronto are looking at, to deploy their centralized data-storage needs that can store and protect their valuable information.

There are three basic requirements when considering data storage – cost, capacity and speed of access. As well, there are different types of data-storage devices that help to meet different data-storage requirements. There are your basic hard drives that are available in various capacities and speeds and solid-state hard drives that do not have moving parts and are more akin to computer memory than hard drives.

Each type of drive has its own advantages; but they also can have their disadvantages too. Where basic hard drives can be fairly inexpensive, business can buy more expensive ones for faster speed. But the real downfall of regular hard drives is that they are mechanical disk drives and can eventually break down as they constantly receive and process data.  Solid-state hard drives are very fast at processing data and may not have mechanical possessing slowing them down or making them at risk for breaking down. They can, however, be quite costly (especially for larger capacity drives).

One of our Toronto office space clients told us that he uses hybrid storage systems – meaning basic hard drives combined with solid-state hard drives. This helps them to achieve the correct performance requirements while still keeping their costs down. They store the bulk of their data files on the basic drives and keep their database and most common queries on the solid-state drives. This also gives them a balance of data speed and size.

One of the best ways to protect the integrity of stored data on the basic hard drives is with a RAID. Many of our office for rent Toronto clients use a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) set-up of several basic hard drives that are mirrors of each other – so that if one disk fails the information is not lost from the other drives in the array. This is nothing new, but it still proves to be an effective solution for the data that is stored on-site.