My current phone, a Pixel 10 Pro, is the first phone I've ever owned that packs 256GB of storage space. Almost six months into owning it, I've still got plenty of storage left, and I'm in no hurry to free up space. But when I recently looked up how much storage I could free up on it for a piece I was writing, I discovered that Spotify took up almost 15GB of space. This wasn't new, but I completely forgot about it after upgrading to the Pixel.

When was the last time you took stock of what storage types you were using? If you have an older computer, it’s possible at least one of your drives is using a tech that’s 40 years old. Here are five storage types that are officially too old to use in 2026.

While SSDs get all the glory these days, mechanical hard drives are not only still in use, they're advancing in both speed and capacity. These devices hold huge amounts of data all over the world, but that data is just not likely to be in your house.

I spent nearly six years running a dual-socket decade-old Xeon server as my primary NAS. Recently, I moved to an off-the-shelf Ugreen NAS and started comparing the two. The thing is, they really can't be compared, and I realized I've spent way more money on that old Lenovo than I originally thought.

If you've been on the fence with whether to buy a NAS (network-attached storage) or not—let me show you a different way. ORICO's latest 9948RC3 PRO DAS (direct-attached storage) system offers great transfer speeds, RAID, and more, all without a pesky network connection or custom operating system to deal with, and I actually really enjoyed using it.

Buying used enterprise storage is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you look at the price and becomes more complicated once you actually put the hardware into a machine. Enterprise HDDs that originally cost a small fortune can appear on the used market for surprisingly little money. For a homelab, where storage capacity is always useful and budgets are rarely unlimited, it is difficult to ignore those prices.

Proxmox is remarkably forgiving when you use it the way it was designed to be used. With it, you can have a functioning homelab in an afternoon, but that ease and simplicity can also encourage a lot of mistakes.

A NAS is one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to keep your data backed up. It’s also fairly reliable, but while HDDs and SSDs can last for years, they will fail eventually. When they do, you could lose everything stored on them, so here are some cheap ways to back up your NAS before that happens.

WinRAR is probably one of the most common third-party apps found on countless Windows PCs around the world, and for good reason. While it's technically paid software, you can use it for as long as you like without paying a dime, it handles a wide selection of archive formats, and it resides in the Windows context menu, so you don't even have to open it to use it.

Most people shouldn't worry about the majority of BIOS settings, since leaving them at their default values makes the most sense. This applies to most SSD-related BIOS settings as well. That said, there's a chance the previous owner messed with them if you bought a used PC, or that one friend who likes to tinker with PCs tweaked your motherboard's BIOS settings without your knowledge.

Deleting files is easy, but making sure those files cannot be recovered later requires a different approach. A normal file deletion operation usually removes filesystem references while leaving the underlying data in place. That allows operating systems to delete files quickly, but it also means recovery software can sometimes retrieve information from previously used storage space.

I’ve been running a Plex server for a long time, which means I’ve made my fair share of amateur mistakes. Storage is probably one of the biggest things plaguing my Plex server, and I have definitely made all three of these mistakes at least once (if not multiple times).