Storage Locations: Local, Network and Online Storages

The storage technologies as we discussed in the previous blog enables us to store our data in different forms that are magnetic, optical and solid state storages. Now we want to see that what are the different locations in which we can store data. There are basically three types of storage locations nowadays which are:

• Local Storage
• Network Storage
• Online Storage

1. Local Storage

Local storage is also called direct attached storage. These storages are directly attached to our system. These have further two types which are

• Internal Local storage: In these kind of local storages, the storage device like hard disks are physically located inside the main case of the computer and they receive power from the inner power supply source. These storages can be attached through the PATA Ribbon cable which has 80 wires for data and 4 wires Molex cable for power Or these can also be attached through SATA cable, which has 5 wires for power and 7 wires for data.
• External Local Storage: These kind of local storages are attached through the output ports like Thunderbolt, USB , Firewire and eSATA ports. These storages either draw their power from the system through the ports to which they are attached or through their own AC adapters.

The following figure shows the external local storages for a system

Figure: External local Storage

2. Network Storage

Network storage is also called hosted storage. This storage is accessed over a LAN in home or office, or wide area network (WAN) with computers in different countries. There are four possible ways for network storage:

• File servers in which the server provides files for its recipients through LAN or WAN. The recipients can view the files or they can edit the files.

Figure: Lab File server

• NAS (Network Attached Storage) This consists of simple stand-alone device having hard disks, file server, and a network connection. It can be accessed through LAN and doesn’t have a keyboard, mouse or monitor. The user connected to this storage can only view the data.

Figure: Network attached storage device

• Network shared volumes: We share a local folder on our computer with the same network users to which we are attached. We can also set permissions that control who can view and edit the shared folder’s content.
• Ad hoc networks: Ad hoc networks doesn’t need the hardware infrastructure and we can establish ad hoc network in a feasible range. There are sub ad hoc networks like Data link ad-hoc network (in which we connect computers through cable like Ethernet etc.) , Wireless ad-hoc network (sharing files through the built in Wireless cards in system) and Blue-tooth ad-hoc network (devices are attached through blue-tooth technology).

Figure: Ad-hoc Network

3. Online Storage

This is same as the network storage but it involve the storage through the whole Internet. There are three sub types of the online storages which are cloud storage, FTP storage and Web-based storage. These three are discussed below

• Cloud Storage uses cloud computing through which we can access the data and applications online and we can store our data on the cloud servers like Google Drive (Google), iCloud (Apple), Dropbox, and OneDrive (Microsoft).

Figure: Cloud Storage

• FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Storage uses special types of application programs installed on the computers for transferring files among them. There are different flavors of FTP like FTPS (FTP over SSL), SFTP (Secure FTP) and many more. These flavors enables the user to communicate through an encrypted link.

Figure: Fire FTP application for FTP storage

• Web-based storage is mostly used nowadays in which different sites have files, applications, programs available and they can be downloaded via clicking their hyper links. There are further two types of websites, one is secure which uses HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) and the other is non secure which uses simple HTTP.

Thanks for Reading…!!!