Wednesday 11 July 2012

Home networking storage solutions for laptops with SSDs

Small laptops or ultrabooks with Solid State Drives or SSDs are becoming increasing popular. While these drives are faster and have no moving parts, they have small storage capacities. While this may be ok for work in progress or work on the go, there are many occasions when you need to access files or information that cannot be stored locally on your device. There are a few home networking storage solutions for laptops with SSDs.

Thanks to cloud storage that problem is solved. With cloud storage you don't need a lot of storage on your local device. Home networking storage solutions for laptops with SSDs include Google Drive, Dropbox, Sugarsync and Pogoplug.

The advantages to these home networking storage solutions for laptops with SSDs are that they are professionally backed up and managed, the odds of you losing your data are quite low. However there is the possibility of the service being temporarily unavailable as people discovered when Amazon’s servers in Virginia went down due to storm-related power outages. These services also allow you to share files and folders, which can be great for co-workers who collaborate on projects or family and friends who want to share photos, videos and other files.

While cloud services provide a limited amount of storage for free (typically 5 GB), they charge for additional storage. Dropbox charges $99 a year for 50 GB of storage. Google Drive is cheaper at $2.49 a month for 25 GB and $4.99 for 100 GB. SugarSync charges $50 a year for 30 GB, $100 for 60 GB and $150 for 100 GB.

An issue with using Dropbox is that it’s designed to synchronize your devices so anything stored in your Dropbox account is also stored on your laptop’s drive. That makes it faster to access, but it can unnecessarily take up space on your laptop’s SSD. SugarSync allows you to get around that issue by giving you a choice of whether to synchronize or just back up any folder on any of your machines.

Pogoplug is a different home networking storage solution for laptops with SSD. It is a device that you install at home and attach one or more external hard drives. So in effect you can have almost unlimited storage for no monthly fee. The Pogoplug doesn’t synchronize your computers, but it does allow you to remotely access that external drive from anywhere with an Internet connection. You can access your files via a Web interface or “mount” the drive so it appears as if it’s a local drive on any PC or Mac. So is a great tool if you travel a lot.

Do you know of other home networking storage solutions for laptops with SSDs if so let us know below?

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