Consumer data storage is too damn small

This is a story about growing older. Clutter, too. But set aside your snarky “Okay, old man” reactions for a moment: You may be genuinely shocked at how much you can store on external storage these days, and how tiny that storage is now, too.

For years, I’ve had a small external hard drive about the size of a hardback book on my desk. From a capacity standpoint, it’s pretty small: just four terabytes. Inside it is a collection of photos, interviews, and random data, in accordance to the “rule of three” of data backups, where data is stored in three places, including your PC.

A hard drive, though, is physically susceptible to damage. My oldest son lost a number of downloaded games that he had stored on an external hard drive after his brother jostled it off his desk, and a string of recent earthquakes in the Bay Area made me wonder what would happen if a jolt shook my drive or something else loose on my desk. So I decided to check out the Black Friday storage sales and invest in an SSD.

A couple of days later, Amazon’s truck arrived. Amazon either piles all of your purchases into a single box or separates everything out into their own containers, so I wasn’t quite sure how the drive would be packaged. I also had assembled my own Woot-like “bag of crap” from Amazon Haul for about 26 bucks , which meant that I had everything from a soldering iron to miniature screwdrivers to expect.

But I was genuinely shocked when my Crucial drive arrived in a package about the size of a deck of cards, and shocked again when the drive itself was about the size of a matchbox. That’s a 4-terabyte drive, mind you.

I know, I shouldn’t be. I can buy an even smaller 2TB microSD card from Amazon that’s small enough to fit on my fingernail. I own M.2 internal SSDs. But when it comes to my desk, I’m used to dealing with ancient external hard drives or even SSDs that feel tangible, even weighty. I have a chunky aluminum Thunderbolt test SSD that could be used for home defense. There’s no way I’ll lose that.

But with my new SSD, I certainly could. Its short USB-C cord that connects it to my docking station doesn’t feel like a connection; it feels like a leash. Even if I was a neatnik — and with testing hubs and docking stations, my desk is rarely organized — I’d still worry about letting it sit unattended. Tell me that that SSD doesn’t look gigantic on Amazon’s webpage. It’s not. Thank goodness I bought it in blue, and not the black color like so much of my other tech gear.

But it’s genuinely unsettling how small that drive is, compared to the importance of the data I store on it. I remember standing on the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, up 120 stories or so. In Taiwan, Taipei 101 walls its own observation deck in with metal barricades and netting. In Dubai, there is (or was) a low railing no different than your own back deck, and that’s all. I leaned over and snapped a shot with one of Microsoft’s great Lumia phones, pointing straight down. One slip, and that phone would have been gone forever. This SSD feels a bit like that.

Now, you can buy card cases for your collection of SD and microSD cards. Smartphones have their own protections. But computer backpacks typically include dozens of pockets and cracks and crevices, and you know how easy it is to lose a wireless earbud. I can’t help wondering if some enterprising Shenzhen startup shouldn’t start building something like a brightly colored “SSD cozy” — not something that would necessarily protect this new generation of micro SSDs, but would allow someone like me to easily see it.

The age of bulky computer gear has ended, thankfully. I never, ever thought I’d miss it. And yet…