In the following video, Amy Blea breaks down the differences between block storage and file storage:īlock Storage vs. It also gives you more granular access to data and consistent performance.

Block storage works well for critical business applications, transactional databases, and virtual machines that require low-latency (minimal delay). To access any file, the server's operating system uses the unique address to pull the blocks back together into the file, which takes less time than navigating through directories and file hierarchies to access a file. Rather than conforming to a rigid directory/subdirectory/folder structure, blocks can be stored anywhere in the system. Block storage breaks a file into equally-sized chunks (or blocks) of data and stores each block separately under a unique address. Block storageīlock storage offers greater storage efficiency (more efficient use of available storage hardware) and faster performance than file storage.

Depending on the various speed and performance requirements of your IT operations and various applications, you might require a combination of these approaches. If you need to store very large or unstructured data volumes, you should consider block-based or object-based storage that organizes and accesses data differently. However, many organizations are now struggling to manage mounting volumes of web-based digital content or unstructured data. object storageįile storage has been a popular storage technique for decades-it’s familiar to virtually every computer user, and it’s well-suited to storing and organizing transactional data or manageable structured data volumes that can be neatly stored in a database in a disk drive on a server. This is also known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Moreover, you eliminate the expense of maintaining your own on-site hardware since this infrastructure is managed and maintained by the cloud service provider (CSP) in its data center. You simply pay a monthly subscription fee to store your file data in the cloud, and you can easily scale-up capacity and specify your data performance and protection criteria. These services allow multiple users to access and share the same file data located in off-site data centers (the cloud). To some extent, you can mitigate these scaling and performance issues with cloud-based file storage services. Scaling requires adding more hardware devices or continually replacing these with higher-capacity devices, both of which can get expensive. But, as the number of files grows, the file retrieval process can become cumbersome and time-consuming. Hierarchical file storage works well with easily organized amounts of structured data.

To locate a file, all you or your computer system need is the path-from directory to subdirectory to folder to file. In file storage, data is stored in files, the files are organized in folders, and the folders are organized under a hierarchy of directories and subdirectories. What is file storage?įile storage-also called file-level or file-based storage-is a hierarchical storage methodology used to organize and store data on a computer hard drive or on network-attached storage (NAS) device.

What is file storage, and when is it most useful? This guide will define file storage, explain its benefits, and look at some typical use cases.

X file storage