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Storage in the digital home

Two decades ago, PCs were perceived as being unsuited to the average consumer’s home. Today, the equipment for crafting a digital home has something of the same stigma. Yogesh Kamat, Country Manager, Indian Subcontinent, Maxtor, tries to clear the air

Ask 10 experts how to build a ‘digital home’ and you’re likely get 10 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. It can all be a bit overwhelming.

We can’t tell you which approach is best; the balance of planning priorities varies from home to home. But we can tell you that one of the most commonly overlooked yet 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 disc storage seemed vast. Then came multimedia, and now 20 gigabytes seems cramped. Our world 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 80 MB. The same album downloaded from a music subscription service (at slightly lower fidelity) would chew up about 45 MB. A conventional 5-megapixel (MP) image captured in standard-compression JPEG format takes up roughly 1 MB. And one hour of uncompressed standard video consumes over 14 GB of disc space. Want to use your computer or a similar TiVo-like device to record your favourite TV show? At DVD-quality recording, that’s about 2 GB 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 100 GB, 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 back-up 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 250 GB mirrored drives still yield only 250 GB 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 disc drives of (equal) capacities.

For those users who do not want to break open their PCs and install another hard drive, a simpler route is to 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 back-up capabilities and not one with software just thrown in the package because this can make the set-up more difficult.

Speaking of back-up, every heavily-used computer should have adequate back-up 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, do you want to risk drive problems at the worst possible time, including the infamous ‘disc 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 back-up, 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 re-union, and 10 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.

Storage Hotspot #2: The Living Room Box

There are four multimedia devices likely to go in the living room or home theatre area of a digital home: a home theatre PC (HTPC), set-top box (STB or DVR/PVR), centralised storage/media server, or a digital media adapter (DMA). Which makes the most sense for you will depend on your multimedia preferences and habits.

An HTPC is a full-blown PC optimised for home theatre applications, generally meaning TV tuning, video storage, photo slideshows, and often gaming. Top performance is achieved when content is stored locally within the HTPC, although pulling data across a high-speed network from a primary PC located elsewhere in the house can serve well enough in some cases. (In such instances, wired is better than wireless.) Many HTPCs cannot accommodate more than one or two hard drives, making backup and/or secondary storage across the network a priority for those who amass a lot of content. Additionally, HTPCs generally get left on 24 hours a day so that they can be accessed by anyone in the home at any time and can record shows late into the night. The downside of this is increased power consumption as well as higher security risk since HTPCs tend to be protected less than primary PCs and are hackable for more hours of the day.

A digital home set-top box is something like a TiVo PVR or a cable/satellite decoder box with built-in recording capabilities. Most industry analysts feel that the majority of digital video recording is and will be done with DVR set-tops as it is the simplest and most affordable way to digitally record television and is currently the only way to record digital HDTV broadcasts. The majority of set-tops come with about 120 hours of storage (standard definition recording), courtesy of a 120 GB hard drive, and is marketed as having its capacity permanently fixed. However, many set-tops can have their hard drives upgraded. weaKnees.com in particular has made an entire business out of upgrading set-tops, enabling them to record up to 900 hours, although doing so may change the warranty on the device.

Moving to digital media adapters, they are disc-less bridges that pull all of their data from the network. DMAs are a great idea if they connect back to a beefy primary media PC (why bother connecting to a slow system with 80 GB of storage, after all?) since they tend to be as user-friendly as a set-top, have far greater functionality, and carry no inherent subscription fees. On the other hand, the main advantage of an HTPC over set-tops or DMAs is that only an HTPC can (so far) provide for applications such as gaming and Web surfing.

No matter how you tackle the living room, though, the key is to identify what content you want displayed there and install plenty of storage capacity for present and future needs at whatever point that content will be saved.

Storage Hotspot #3: The Network Media Server

In the consumer world, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, also called network shared storage, have become increasingly popular as a safe, easy, dependable way to quickly add storage to an office so that anyone (with permission) on the LAN can access. The advantage of a shared storage solution is that it simply plugs into the network, and there is no host PC to depend upon. Thus, data on a shared storage box is immune to malware and most system failures that plague many computers. No matter how many systems on the LAN go down, the shared storage solution keeps dishing up data to whoever wants it.

The reasons IT managers love NAS still apply in the digital home. It pays to have a small, quiet, power-efficient storage server for multimedia content that can stream to any PC on the LAN. Particularly in areas where electricity costs are skyrocketing, being able to turn off a kilowatt-guzzling primary PC and still have all of your photos, videos and other files available throughout the home can be a serious plus.

A consumer shared storage device shouldn’t be underestimated as a back-up device either. In the event of a natural disaster or such, the drive can be unplugged and whisked to safety. As those who have suffered fire or flood will often testify, the most painful losses are often the digital memories and memorabilia of a family’s history—not everyday objects that can be replaced.

Play on

20 years ago, PCs were perceived as being horribly complex, cost-prohibitive devices unsuited to the average consumer’s home. Today, the equipment behind crafting a digital home has something of the same stigma. You don’t need to build an end-to-end digital home all at once. The trick is know what pieces you want, then add them as need and budget allow with an eye always on high-speed network performance and plenty of easily accessible storage. With time and slow investment, the many life-changing benefits of living in a digital home will naturally follow.

The author can be reached at yogi@maxtor.com