Storage: The Underrated Topic
Tags: system, systemdesign, storage, webdev
Published: 2022-11-02 08:28:20

Every person — in a technical or non-technical field — know about storage. It is simply storing something — be it groceries in our homes or data in our phones/laptops. Storing is one of the basic habits we learn in our home.

Here, we will see what storage means in the technical field. As we have acknowledged that storage means storing things, here we store information of any app, system, or service. You can store and retrieve that data which is very flexible. Storing has always had one purpose — to fetch it in a time of need and this is what it does here.

We use the database — a software layer to store and retrieve the data respectively. There are two operations here: -

1. Storing (set, store, fetch)

2. Retrieving (get, fetch, read)

In the real world, if you save something somewhere, you expect it to be exactly there when you look for it. But it doesn’t work like that in the computing world. There are two types of storage available.

1. Memory Storage

2. Disk Storage

Among these two, the disk is more robust and permanent, but we can’t say it’s truly permanent but just persistent. When you save something to your disk memory and turn the power off your device or restart your server the data will not last but will stay persist. However, the data stored in memory storage is wiped away when you shut down or restart. This means that the data stored in memory storage just remains there until the session is over. Your computing devices will have both disk and memory storage types. The disk memory storage types include a hard disk while the memory storage type includes RAM.

When choosing the track of the data you need to keep you have to consider where to keep it either in disk or memory. this depends on the data you are using. If the data, you are keeping track of is useful only for a session then you should store them in memory storage which is faster and cheaper. But if you need the data even after the session is over then you should consider saving them in a disk.

For example for a site where it asks you for your login details, you do not need your login data after you log out which means that would be saved somewhere in memory storage but those data which you need to hold on to should be saved on the disk stories which might be the data you downloaded from inside the login page or the data you need to log in for the next time.

Moving on storage sounds very easy but when you must choose one for you with an adequate range of products and solutions, we might be very confused, and it gets complex. We need different types of storage with different types of use cases. it depends on your system requirement or sometimes sentence even depends on how your user chooses to interact with the system.

That’s why I have prepared a small list of the factors that determine what type of storage you should use.

1. How your data is structured?

2. Availability

3. Scalability

4. Consistency

When you consider the above points while choosing storage for you then you will have a good one according to your need.

## Conclusion

This is the basic introduction to storage and its type and how you need to choose the storage you will use for a long time. Though this is not an advanced explanation of all of them then this will give you a general idea to move on with the topic.

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