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Jordan Gillette
Mrs. Grogan
English 101
05 May 23
The Future of Digital Data Storage
As we progress into the digital age, our demands for digital data storage are mounting.
The demand for more storage is quickly expanding even in our own homes with higher
resolutions in pictures and videos. There are many solutions to this problem, two of which are
cloud storage, which many are already familiar with or a personal home NAS (network-attached
storage). A NAS is a specialized computer designed solely for storage and sharing data with
whoever is allowed access to it like family, friends, or on a larger scale, even a whole company.
With increasing file sizes and the demand for data storage, there is a need for an online storage
method. A home NAS is an excellent solution to that problem, with an excellent price-to-size
ratio and robust redundancy.
We must first discuss the different types of drives to go deeper into what a NAS is. A
drive is a physical device that stores data, and it is what you plug into your computer to read and
write information. There are several different types of drives used in the modern day, including
SATA (serial advanced technology attachment), HDD (hard disk drive), SATA SSD (solid-state
drive), and an M.2 NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) drive.
SATA and M.2 are standards for attaching drives to the motherboard. SATA is a standard
that uses a cable to connect the drive to the motherboard. It is a cheaper solution, but it has some
drawbacks as they are limited to the speed that they can go. In contrast, M.2 is a much faster
standard that connects directly to the motherboard using PCIe X4. This type of connection has
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direct leads connecting it to the CPU, vastly outperforming any SATA drive (Amsbarra). The fact
that it directly connects to the motherboard making it so fast also makes it a bad option for most
NASs as there are very few spots for NVMes on the motherboard.
The data can be physically stored on a drive in two ways: an HDD or an SSD; NVMe is
technically a form of SSD. An HDD uses a physical disk that spins like a CD. It has a
read-and-write head gliding over those disks, and the data is stored using magnetic forces. With
the moving parts, the lifespan of these drives is measured by a certain number of reads and
writes, for a high end one that is about 600,000 load unload cycles, not a specific amount of
time. On the other hand, the SSD has no moving parts and instead works by using electricity to
flip the charge of gates in NAND chips. With no moving parts, its lifespan is measured by the
number of years until the materials break down and stop holding charges accurately.
The final comparison of these drives deals with speed. NVMe is the fastest option, but
there are better options for logistical reasons, as stated before. For a NAS, SATA, and SSDs are
better options. An SSD is much faster than an HDD, but it also comes at a higher price. “Average
SSD Price Compared to HDD − 3x-5x higher cost” (Mohammadamin). When it comes to a NAS,
you probably would not have the HDDs spinning at all times, so you would have to factor in a
spin-up time when you start using it. It can add several seconds of latency, an essential factor in
choosing a drive.
Within SATA drives there are two different form factors. There is a smaller version that is
2.5 inches. “the 2.5-inch SATA drive and is most often used in laptop computers and small form
factor desktops”(Amsbarra). They are great for many applications, but for a NAS the physical
size is not a huge concern as the main focus is how much data they can hold. The lager size is the
3.5 inch drive. “the 3.5-inch SATA drive and these are used in all mid- and full-size desktop
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computers.” (Amsbarra). This size of drive tends to hold more data and because of that it is the
better choice for a home NAS.
The next step to understanding how NAS works is understanding how we combine all of
the drives that we have in the system into one single storage device. We achieve this through
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). There are many different types of RAID. You
have RAID 0-7, 10, 50, and 60. For this paper, we do not need to go into RAID 10, 50, and 60 as
they are just combinations of other RAIDs and are more focused on an enterprise market than a
consumer. We also do not need to go into RAID 2, 3, and 4 as they do not apply to a modern
NAS. RAID can combine these drives through software housed in the BIOS (basic input/output
system). The BIOS is the OS (operating system) of the motherboard. It is always running under
your computer’s regular OS. Because it runs under the regular operating system, it can grab,
combine, and manage all the different singles from the drives. It shows one combined storage
device to the regular OS, which you would see while using the computer.
Within the RAID there are several different types. Some of the important ones are RAID
0, 1, 4, 5, and 6. Below is a chart that represents the different types. A good analogy is where we
represent each drive as a piece of paper, and the data as words being written on that paper.
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For RAID 0, imagine you take all your
papers and line them up side by side.
Then you would start writing on the
first line of the first page. When you get
to the end of the first line, instead of
going to the second line of page 1, you
go to the first line of page 2. When you
get to the end of the first line of page 2,
then you go on to page 3, and so on till
you get to your last page. When you hit
the last page, you go on to the second
line of page 1 and repeat. This general
concept, done with data and drives, not
(Chen et al.)
paper, is called striping.
Striping is used in most types of RAID, but RAID 0 is solely striping. RAID 0 is
high-speed, as you can write on all the drives simultaneously. With this speed comes a
considerable cost; if one of your drives fails, you lose all of the data on all of them because you
lose the critical context of what connects the data between the drives. RAID 1, on the other hand,
is like RAID 0 in how you strip the data across the drives, but you have a second set of drives
that has an exact copy of all of the data. You can see this represented by the diagram above,
where the white is the original drive, and the gray is the copies. This setup is highly redundant,
which means you can lose drives and not necessarily lose data. You can lose any one drive to
failure and sometimes even more, but that is not a guarantee. This style also comes at a
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significant cost; you lose half of the storage space of the drives as usable capacity, so it is
inefficient.
Another type is RAID 4. For this one, envision lining up all your papers and writing
across them just like you did for RAID 0. However, when you get to the last page, instead of
writing across the first line of the last page, you write a quick summary of what you just wrote on
the other first lines. Then you move to the second line of page 1. If you look at the diagram
above, you can see how that would be, with all the white being the regular data and the gray ones
being the summary, also called the parity data. The parity data allows for redundancy where you
can lose any one drive without losing everything, without losing as much of your capacity.
RAID 5 is very similar to RAID 4 in how it has striped data, with one drive per line being
reserved for parity data. However, in RAID 5, which drive is responsible for the parity data
changes line by line. As you can see in the diagram, the dive that has the parity data is constantly
changing. This provides some slight effects and benefits over RAID 4 in terms of storage
capacity and speed of rebuilding the RAID if there is a drive failure. Another advantage of it is
“using the RAID5 technique can reduce the page error rate compared with ECC” (Seung-Ho and
Ki-Woong). RAID 5 is superior to RAID 4 in all ways.
RAID 6 is the final RAID we will review in this paper. It is similar to RAID 5 in that it
has parity data and that data is rotated throughout the different drives. It differs because you
reserve two drives per line for parity data, each containing the same parity data. With this
system, you can lose any two drives and still have enough data to rebuild the entire data set
without loss. However, this comes at a slight speed and storage cost over RAID 5. Both are great
options for a home NAS.
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There are a couple different ways to set up a home NAS. There are two main options for
looking at a home NAS. You can either make one yourself or buy a prebuilt one. Building one
yourself requires a fair degree of technical know-how, but you can end up with a system that is
far more specialized to your needs and far cheaper, sometimes several hundred dollars cheaper.
When you buy a prebuilt, it is far more time effective, requiring less work and menace on your
part. Both are great solutions for a home NAS. It depends on your situation which is better.
When comparing a NAS to cloud storage, both have advantages and disadvantages. The
price per storage for cloud storage is quite good, but as the amount of storage you require, a
home NAS will quickly perform it. You can buy a Synology drive with 8Tb of storage for 500$
on Amazon while getting just 5Tb with google drive will cost 250$ a year. In just two years,
buying your own NAS makes more sense. The main disadvantage to a home NAS is that “If two
or more users are modifying the same file, they are doing so to their private copies of it. Neither
sees the other’s changes and the last one to close the file will upload the changes, overwriting the
other user’s version.” (Krzyzanowski). This is not an issue if you are storing a bunch of photos
and videos or if you are the only one to use it, but if you have many documents that multiple
people will go and edit, then a cloud solution like google drive is far better.
A NAS is an excellent method of storing data, but it is not the right solution for everyone.
If you have significant storage needs and do not have demands for concurrent editing, then there
is nothing better than a home NAS.
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Works Cited
Amsbarra. “Types of Hard Drives - Engineering Information Technology Help.” Engineering
Information Technology Help -, 30 July 2020,
it.engr.ncsu.edu/help/kb/types-of-hard-drives/.
Chen, Peter M., et al. “RAID: High-Performance, Reliable Secondary Storage.” AMC Computer
Surveys, www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/RAID/computin.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2023.
Krzyzanowski, Paul. “Network Attached Storage Distributed File Systems.” Network Attached
Storage, Mar. 2021, https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/417/notes/nas.html.
Lim, Seung-Ho, and Ki-Woong Park. “Compression-Assisted Adaptive ECC and RAID
Scattering for NAND Flash Storage Devices.” Sensors (14248220), vol. 20, no. 10, May
2020, p. 2952. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.3390/s20102952.
Mohammadamin , Ajdari. “A Scalable System Design for Data Reduction in Modern Storage
Servers.” Sharif University of Technology, 22 Jan. 2020,
sharif.edu/~kharrazi/data_talks/slides/data-talks-ajdari-98-11-2-slides.pdf.