A business needs to think about how to use storage space the most efficiently.
One main issue a business has, is sharing information. A filing cabinet is not much use if only one person can access it.
Information can be shared through a network of computers.
A file server is a computer that holds files on one hard-drive, and everyone on the network can access them.
The simplest way a small business achieves this is to share a part of the hard-drive of one computer with everyone else. This is a cheap, simple solution if there is not too much traffic.

A dedicated file server is a computer that is purely providing a shared storage space.
The larger the business and the larger the amount of data in use will dictate what kind of server a business needs. Large businesses may need to use a server that has multiple storage disks working as a team. This means that they all hold copies of the same information and update each other all day. This also means that a lot of storage space is used up for copies. At first glance this may seem like a waste of money and space, but the reason behind this is that if one hard drive were to fail, the whole system continues to work as you did not lose your data, and a new hard drive can be put into the system without shutting anything down. For large businesses this is crucial as even losing one hour’s work could be a disaster.
Smaller businesses would back their work up every hour or day and lose some time for repairs and re-entering data lost.
When it is time to upgrade your business computers, it is well worthwhile thinking about how you can manage your information more efficiently rather than just replacing a machine with something the same.

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Storage space is always in demand for digital medium and I’ve been discussing various types of storage lately, so in line with this let’s look at external hard-drives.  The hard-drive is your storage container.  When you save something, it goes into a folder on your hard-drive, so it is rather like a filing cabinet.
External hard drives are literally outside the actual computer box, and are used to store files whilst preventing your computer hard drive from becoming too full.

If your computer hard drive becomes too full (more than around 80-85%) you will notice your computer will steadily slow down and if you do not clean it up you could risk files corrupting.
Today we want to store such large files (particularly music and movies) that there just never seems to be enough space to satisfy us!
External drives commonly connect to your computer using USB (like the flash drives), although the better connection type, because of its higher speed, is firewire.

They are not very tolerant of physical shocks or jarring, as are the flash drives, as they have platters and moving heads, so even though they are external and relatively compact, I would not recommend making a practice of travelling them around.

The sizes today for the price are extremely appealing and they are the perfect medium for your backups.  The most common sizes that are very cost effective are the 500 GB and 1 TB (1000 GB)
Apple has provided an awesome backup system in their latest operating system called Time Machine.  Once set up you only need to have your external drive plugged in and the back up is automatic.  Mine backs up every hour!
Windows also provide backup utilities though many people use other software to perform these automatic backups.

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The iPod and MP3 player are basically the same thing except that the iPod is a brand belonging to Apple whilst MP3 players could be any other brand. They were designed to download music from your computer and play them independently of the computer, either through a tiny inbuilt speaker or more commonly through earphones.
	Over only a few years they have been further developed to also view images and video. This has resulted in their becoming increasingly popular to download and watch podcasts of all kinds. I remember how popular the portable CD player was not that many years back, but they are now a rare item. You don’t need to change the CD, the storage capacity on the devices allows hundreds or even thousands of songs to be stored (albeit in a poor quality format) and you can add and remove songs or video whenever you wish.
For business, you could consider whether there would be any benefits to marketing via podcasting. The cost of a television commercial is huge, especially compared to the cost of a short video clip on a product or service being podcast and reaching people who want to know about what you offer. This is probably one of the greatest advantages of podcasting – rather than spraying your advertising out at an audience that may not be interested, the audience that is indeed interested comes to you for the information they want, and by subscribing to your podcasts, continues to receive information as you put new podcasts up.
	They are used for education in a wide variety of settings. Students can watch video demonstrations of technical processes whenever they need the information. Lectures can be taped and listened to a second time or for students unable to attend classes. Most mobile phones now have some kind of MP3 player built into them so the potential audience is huge.

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Today we expect enormous storage space on our computers. I still get a giggle remembering my uncle buying a new computer during the early 80’s, and being thrilled with his foresight in buying the biggest hard drive you could get – a massive 20 MB – so big in fact that he partitioned it into 2 drives of 10 MB each, and generously gave one whole partition to his son for games!
Bill Gates announced, “640 KB of RAM ought to be enough for anybody” in the late 70’s.

In the computing world today we not only have huge hard drives, but a wide range of other mediums to compliment storage.
A brilliant little device that is immensely popular goes by a variety of names – jump drive, USB stick, memory stick, flash drive and variations of these. They come in a surprising variety of casings that are designed to entice people to buy a particular brand. When purchasing one shop around a little to find the best value – the largest amount of storage space for your money. They are far more reliable as a temporary storage medium than were the old floppy disks, which were notorious for failing when you needed them most, and are easy to carry around.
There are a few things I would mention about them however. Firstly they are for storage and I don’t recommend that you work directly on files stored on them, but save a copy to the drive when you are finished and ensure that you correctly eject the drive when done. Secondly they are not a great medium for backup. It is difficult to write protect them, so accidental overwriting is too easy, and if you carry them around and connect them to other computers, they are vulnerable to damage in transit, loss and infection.

They can contain music files, but are quite different to MP3 players and iPods as these devices actually play the music for you independently of the computer.

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