There’s an episode in HBO’s Sex and The City in which Carrie Bradshaw’s laptop dies on her one day, immediately wiping out everything that she’s ever written. “Don’t you ever back up?” asks her current boyfriend, not at all easing her devastated condition. If only she had saved her work in some other form of storage space apart from her now-defunct laptop.

Stefanie Khaw

We all need storage space. Not the kind you associate with boxes and warehouses but storage space measured in bytes. If you’re old enough to remember, you’ll remember when we were still using 3.5-inch floppy discs. The disc, which was in fact square-shaped, was only capable of storing 1.44 megabytes (MBs) each. When you consider the plethora of storage options at hand today, you’ll find some which have transcended the MB mark, hitting gigabytes (GB) already.


It doesn’t matter if you’re looking to store documents from work or wanting to back up photos you took during last year’s Christmas dinner, you’ll be an expert on the various memory storage options at hand by the time I’m done.

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Starting from the bottom, we have discs: CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-/+RWs,  DVD-Rs and DVD-RAMs. How do you decipher all that? Simple: CD-Rs and DVD-Rs can record data only once while the rest are able to record data thousands of times.

The capacities for CDs normally range from 650MBs to 700MBs while DVDs are capable of storing up to 10GBs. CDs are cheap – a single disc won’t cost you more than RM1. I’d estimate that they’re used mostly for storing downloaded movies and TV programs but some people use them to store digital photos as well.

Moving on, we have flash memory. A considerable number of camera manufacturers use the Secure Digital (SD) format in their product lines. These include Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Panasonic and Konica Minolta. Cameras that accept SD cards are usually designed to accept MultiMediaCards (MMCs) as well because the SD card is essentially a second-generation MMC card. You’ll find that most mobile phones and PDAs utilise this format for their expandable memory. The miniSD card is also used in some PDAs. It’s just a smaller albeit a more expensive version of the original.

xD picture cards were developed by Olympus and Fujifilm. xD cards are used exclusively in cameras manufactured by these companies and are more expensive than other card formats.  Sony’s Memory Stick is one of the newest forms of flash memory and like the xD card, it is used exclusively in Sony digital cameras, camcorders, handhelds and music players. CompactFlash (CF) Cards are mainly used in SLR digital cameras but are used in some PDAs by Dell, Fujitsu and Hewlett Packard also. Apart from cards, flash memory also comes in the form of USB Flash Drives.

They’re probably the most robust of all flash drives so they’re sturdy enough to be carried around everywhere in your pocket. Despite being smaller than CDs and DVDs, most flash memory formats can store up to 8GBs worth of data. Of course this innovative priviledge comes with a price as some cost as much as a few hundred ringgit.

Hard drive MP3 Players, as the name depicts are used mostly for audio file storage purposes but at the same time enabling the user listening access to them. Most people have their entire music collection stored on their MP3 players, amounting to around 10,000 songs sometimes. If you own a fifth generation iPod, you’ll be able to store and view entire movies and digital photos on top of listening to your music. If you’ve got an older version of the iPod, say a 4th generation one which does not have video capabilites yet, you  can still watch stored movies on your computer via a connecting USB cable. Your computer will treat the iPod like a hard drive in which video files are stored. 

Hard drive MP3 players don’t come cheap, mind you. They normally cost more than RM1000 and while flash based MP3 players are much cheaper, their storage capacities don’t even come close to their hard drive counterparts. 

Finally, at the top we have portable hard drives. Some anime-buffs I know store entire tomes of Bleach and Naruto shows on their external hard drives. They generally are the size of your average paperback novel and most can store 80GBs to 200GBs. Good hard drives to look out for include products from Maxtor and Western Digital. Prices range from RM150 to RM350.

Evidently, certain storage options cost more than others. Despite having extremely large capacities, some of us don’t have 100GBs worth of Word documents to store. And sometimes a lot of the photos you took during that Christmas dinner were blurred anyway. When comparing storage options, always ask yourself what is it you want to store and how important that data is to you. Otherwise, you’ll end up being the anti-thesis of Ms Bradshaw with a sudden urge to back up everything.