What is special about scientific (bioimaging) data storage?
Intuitively, most people think of a hard drive (or a USB stick) externally plugged into a computer or internally installed when we talk about storage. While this is sufficient for many everyday cases, scientific-scale data storage comes with challenges that go far beyond what we typically encounter in daily life.
Very large datasets, like those produced in science, can quickly exceed the storage capacity of hard drives (even a 5 TB hard drive can fill up within a couple of days with some imaging modalities). While it might seem reasonable to buy many large drives and fill them one after the other, this practice is problematic for several reasons:
- A hard drive can get damaged or lost, leading to data loss or corruption.
- The cost of purchasing many individual hard drives is very high.
- Sharing data with others would require physically moving hard drives from one place to another, increasing the risk of data loss or theft.
In contrast, storage for scientific data must fulfill several important criteria:
- Safety: Data should be securely backed up to avoid the loss of valuable data from expensive experiments.
- Scalability: As data accumulates over the course of a research project, it must be ensured that sufficient storage is available.
- Suitability: Not all types of storage are well-suited for all purposes. There are differences in storage technologies. Critical questions include: How fast can data be written? How fast can data be retrieved? Can storage be expanded once a specific disk is full? Etc.
Continue reading about suitable storage for bioimage data.
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