Advantage & Disadvantages of Secondary Storage | Good For Backup?

To put it in a simple way, the secondary storage refers to the computer hardware used for storing lots of files. This is actually in contrast with the primary storage (which is also known as main storage; the data stored here will be lost once the power is cut off).

The secondary storage devices have the following main functions:

• Storing data that need to be kept for a long time
• Backing up data in case of sudden failure
• Making it convenient for data transfer from one place to another

The Secondary Storage Devices Are Suitable for Backup

When data backup is involved, most people may lay their focus on the backup of the critical workloads. Yet, the fact is not all the data that have been backed up can fit the criteria of a critical workload.

The fact is that you should save the noncritical data to a secondary storage device; this is equal to the nonvolatile storage system, in which data protection and archiving features are provided.

Thus, the secondary storage device plays a very important role in data backup.

Things to Consider before Getting Secondary Storage

However, a lot of users are not sure whether they need a secondary storage device to work as part of their backup strategy. In this case, they should think about if they have any of the following things:

• Data waiting to be archived
• Scientific data and reference data
• Gold image virtual machines
• The older operational data which are not needed everyday

The things mentioned above may be needed in the future to be as part of the recovery work. Yet, they are definitely not the critical workloads. You may need a secondary storage device to make sure that those kinds of data can be recovered after getting lost due to the following reasons:

• System upgrade
• Hard drive crash
• File corruption
• Other unknown reasons

4 Common Types of Secondary Storage Devices

I’ll mainly introduce four types of storage devices that can be used for secondary storage.

Internal Hard Disk Drives

Though the spinning disk is discarded by some people, this traditional HDD still meet the requirement and is still a feasible choice. Two most important reasons to explain why many people chose hard disks for secondary storage are:

1. It is less expensive when compared to other disks.
2. The data stored here do not have any fast recovery requirements.

External Hard Drives

The throughput speeds of an external drive are really fast, all thanks to the introduction of the USB 3.0. This even makes it possible for organizations to make backups off-site easily.

Yet, there’s still challenge for this: even equipped with USB 3.0, the external hard drive’s viability is still depending on the drive type.

The Cloud

One of the most important reasons why cloud is so popular is that the providers can provide faster storage at a lower cost than you could get yourself. There are multiple storage tiers and the storage management is useful for moving data among different tiers. In this way, you can minimize the storage costs.

Besides, the speed of backup and recovery can be comparable to on-premises hardware due to the advancements in deduplication and compression technologies.

Flash Storage Arrays

This is usually regarded as the NAS (Network Attached Storage).

Comparison of a flash-based storage and a disk-based storage:

• The access speed of the former is faster than that of the latter.
• The latency of the former is lower than that of the latter.
• The flash-based storage is less likely to fail.

Well, the biggest challenge of flash storage arrays is the balance of cost and utilization. Thus, you may need to search for scalable storage products in order to realize more as-needed expense.

Click to see how to finish NAS HDD recovery.

Please choose a secondary storage device according to your actual needs.