Storage has sort of been a interest of mine. Not only did i use it for primary storage, but also for backup, and in some cases, to boot an OS. As I dug through my boxes of drives, I became amazed at the changes of storage through the years. I have owned several different types of hosts (Windows, Mac, Linux), connector (Firewire, USB, SATA, IDE), and media (3.5" HDD, 2.5" HDD, 2.5" SSD). Here is a quick walk through of some of my setup:
1) Firewire to iMac HDD : on the "Intel Aluminum" iMacs, the Fireware port was supposedly a cool thing to have. So I bought a Firewire enclosure to fit a 3.5" HDD. Worked great, but later on found that USB drives were ok too.
2) 3.5" SATA HDD : this might have been one of my first SATA drives that pivoted away from messy IDE.
3) USB DAS : I used this Direct Attached Storage as a desktop unit to backup my Windows laptop. Its slick shape made it look appealing on my desk.
4) NAS : this was my first Network Attached Storage, configured to RAID 0 because I really needed space (so there is no redundancy of data - bad!). This particular model also can host an Apache Web Server with a MySQL database.
5) 2.5" SATA SSD : this small for factor was idea for laptops and NUCs. I found this cheaper than to buy a "proper" flash USB drive. Had to buy a SATA to USB connector to use the SSD as plug in storage.
6) Boot macOS from 2.5" SATA SSD : I wanted to have a sandbox macOS environment, and so I installed macOS on to the external 2.5" SATA SSD and boot my Macbook from it.
