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CRTs also have other advantages, of higher viewing angle than LCDs and higher color gamut and larger dynamic range. I still prefer using a LaCie Electron Blue CRT to do my Photoshop work. Most video cards RAMDACs are limited to 8-bit (exceptions I can think of are SGI Onyx IR and Tezro systems and other specialized gfx cards), CRTs could easily do 10-bit, 12-bit color per pixel. If you're in the print and publishing industry you'll still want to use a CRT unless the 21" CRT hulk is crowding your workspace, or a radiologist who needs 10-bit or greater grayscale to discern which legions in the x-ray have a tumor. I don't want my radiologist looking at no 8-bit (256 shade) video card and monitor for my X-rays. I haven't seen any specs on what the OLEDs can do. All that stated is that its comparable, which is vague and ambiguous to me.

Put one hard drive power supply in the Pelican case, use the other one with the hard drives to back your systems up. Even with my MP3 collection, I can still use one of these drives to back up my Macintosh and quite a bit of other stuff. Use the other drive to back up Windows and UNIX boxes, nothing fancy, mount the drive and drag entire filesystems over or tar them up and copy them over. Unmount drives from system, put into Pelican case, put Pelican case in gun safe. Backup systems as needed. I figure that if shit goes down and I need to bail on my house that I'm going to make a stop at the gun safe for a few items, so it's the natural place to put the hard drive case.

In case of bad things happening to to gun safe, retrieve weapons, passport, emergency cash and hard drives. Head out to car and head to safety. No fuss, no muss. Much easier than the idiocy that Cringely describes.

Of course this will work. There are no 1Tb hard drives to copy the.. ...oh wait.

Links make baby jesus happy: LaCie Bigger Disk

2.5" (laptop) drives are pretty damn expensive, but they are more convenient as they can be bus powered. Here's an example but I'm sure you can get them for cheaper. I'd personally rather buy the enclosure separate from the drive because I can usually get a longer warranty on the drive itself and I don't have to worry about voiding the warranty if I open the enclosure.

I personally only buy external drives for video stuff so I get 3.5" ones.

Another option would be to get an iPod or iPod mini type device.

I have a 128 meg USB keychain and I really like it. It's a Transcend JetFlash. But it's only good for documents and the occasional set of photos or MP3s.

Personally, this stuff is pretty obvious, just Google around. It's not like there's some kind of hidden mega-cube storage out there that only a few people know about. Pretty basic stuff.

Are they selling multi-drive usb enclosures yet? like this LaCie Big Drive? (yeah I know it 1394 not USB) How about rolling your own, any EE's /CE's feel up to combining a raid card and a usb enclosure? I don't have the know how to do it but I'd gladly benefit from it.

Yep, totally agree. Do you remember the LaCie 1.6GB FW-drive released to market a few weeks back. This is nothing but four IDE drives in a raid configuration, and it's not redundancy raid...

I really wonder what the expected lifetime is on such a device. Sure you can replace the broken drive, but you should probably get the same model to replace the broken with, AND if one has gone down.. how long 'til the next one goes ?

Its probably great for things like offsite backups, you run it an hour here, and hour there, but it sure dont seem like a reliable solution to store valuable data on.

OOOOOoooooh! Shiny Firewire 800! Not like you could BUY a PC Firewire 800 card for a PC or anything...

I don't think the fibre channel controller is that much of the cost. Pricewatch lists FC PCI cards for ~$105. Probably the same cost as FW800,ethernet, and the related embedded controller those would require. The entry level xserve raid is $5k for 1TB (4*250G), I don't think that price would be cut too much by merely taking out half the drive bays. Possibly some would be cut by taking out the redundant PSU and raid controller, but probably not more than a couple hundred. PSUs are cheap, and full raid5 SATA 4-channel PCI controllers retail for a couple hundred, certainly less in OEM quantities for just the chipset.
If all you really want cheap bulk storage, what you probably want is the Lacie Bigger Disk, 1.6T for $2.2k, FW800. Add on a cheap linux box with gigE and FW800 for $300 or so, and you have your NAS with more storage than the xserve raid, more connectivity for half the price. But I wouldn't put it against the xserve raid for reliability or performance any day.

Even cheaper : 2000USD for 1.6TB... Guaranteed.

Just buy one of these external USB/Firewire terabyte drives for $1200. No fuss, and you can plug in a few of them to a single machine if you want.

Somebody already mentioned this on this thread: Lacie - Bigger Disk is a TB disk with a price tag of $1200.

It is more expensive than the system proposed above, but it is less hassle (a nice case), and can easily be chained by several units as your demand increases. It is probably faster than software RAID with ATA/133. And, it is cheaper than a true raid (say Apple Xserve RAID - 4 times cheaper!), and its performance -even with a few chained units- is definitely sufficient for a home user who has less than a few running processes.

And, don't forget the labor of putting 10-20 HDs together, also, include a possible CPU/board price if you have to put it in a separate case. in addition to this, add the possible cost of hardware failure due to not very well designed system (air flow, power requirements, etc...)

And, you can software-mirror those units and construct software RAID if you wish.

I think it is the best solution for a serious user who values its data.

Or you could just get your 1TB in a nifty little package from Lacie. Want Mirroring? buy two for less than the price of one of those Xserves. www.lacie.com

The Bigger Disk and Bigger Disk Extreme are both RAID, just not fault tolerant RAID.

Lacie also makes some server storage solutions...

Check out the Ethernet Disk and their TX12000.

The Bigger Disk and Bigger Disk Extreme are both RAID, just not fault tolerant RAID.

Lacie also makes some server storage solutions...

Check out the Ethernet Disk and their TX12000.

I know LaCie makes some 1 terabyte+ stuff. I think it's been mentioned on /. before.

They have 'em. Or an Xserve RAID.

It's not RAID, but you could buy a 1-terabyte drive from LaCie.

What about those storage arrays from LaCie? You can get a terabytes per device (or more) for only like US$1,199, with a firewire interface...
What about NAS? Such as IDE over IP (storage units with network connections)? or whatever
What about SCSI storage units (like 6 hard drives in a box or whatever - connecting to an external SCSI interface)?
Maybe they could have something like System X - you know, 1,100 PowerMac G5's clustered - at a total cost of about US$5.5m.

and here's the link
LaCie Bigger Disk

only problem i have with it is that they claim that 1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

not even 1,000 Gb
let alone 1,000,000 Mb

one of the oldest tricks in the book but still an oh-so-common practice

I've been using one of these 1 TB USB/firewire drives. It's a wonderful thing; entirely self-contained, with no cluster to manage or worry about. USB allows for 127 devices, so you should be able to acquire as much hard drive space as you need. They can be easily unplugged and stored, too.

Well, if it has either FireWire 800, FireWire or USB 2.0, it could have a 1 TB disk.

That's almost 247 hours of recording at 9 Mb/second (DVD).

Wait, that price is just for the chassis? No disks? Wow, you got ripped off. The LaCie Bigger Disk lists around $1200 and includes 1 TB of disk.

Now this would be something. ;-)

Apple's Backup application that comes free with a .Mac membership allows you to back up your data onto an iPod. I recently had to buy a mobile LaCie external hard drive because my old 20 gig iPod didn't have enough space to use it this way and still function as an MP3 player. Considering the importance of backups, a 60 gig iPod would be very useful.

...and go with this. That is, unless you just NEED a FlashDrive...

Poor you, only 12 gig. I drag this around with me.

Whenever you decide to spend $1200 on the storage.

I've also heard of 1TB external hard drives. It would be pretty simple to set up a system with more than 1TB of storage.

External 1TB drive, for those interested.

Ummm... yes we do?

Now where are those terabyte drives?

One Terrabyte actually, for about $1199.

Yes, I can imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...

Also, don't forget that companies like Lacie and devices like the iPod have also caused there to be excellent alternatives.

An iPod in hand, a couple of these under my desk, and a SuperDrive on all of my devices insure that I will never bother with Iomega.

-WS

In short, unless there is a really good reason to want the wireless aspect, this enclosure is a monstrous waste of cash.

In short, unless there is a really good reason to want the wireless aspect, this enclosure is a monstrous waste of cash.

Looks like LaCie makes the perfect case for you, except it is for a hard drive and sold as a finished product. Who else thinks the LaCie Big Disk Triple Interface is a good price at $550 (or less) for 500 GB of 7200 rpm, 8 MB cache, FireWire 800, 400, and USB 2.0 (backwards compatible with USB 1.1) external hard drive goodness?

Not as of last month. La Cie came out with 500 GB external FireWire800/FireWire400/USB2.0 Big Disk Extreme Drive. I'd say Hitachi is late to this party. And DeathStar joke are on the whole pretty lame (though the motherboard force field one was good).

Not as of last month. La Cie came out with 500 GB external FireWire800/FireWire400/USB2.0 Big Disk Extreme Drive. I'd say Hitachi is late to this party. And DeathStar joke are on the whole pretty lame (though the motherboard force field one was good).

And since we're on the topic of storage, one of those peripherals could certainly be this.

Get your credit card ready for the $1200 expense.

He said "in [his] pocket", not backpack :)

If someone made a firewire drive that could carry one terabyte of data, I would buy it! Why? Don't ask, but the mere thought of carrying 1000 GB in my pocket is freaky.

Get your credit card ready for the $1200 expense.

LaCie is selling an external unit where 1TB of storage capacity is fitted in 5.25"
It's probably not one disk that's in there, or is it a 5.25"? Well, eihterway the laptop HD's still win when it comes to cap./vol., be it at slightly lower transfer rates.

A friend recently pointed out this new drive from Lacie, 1TB priced at about $1200. As others have pointed out this probably wouldn't be enough for *tons* of uncompressed DVDs, since many are dual-layered and HUGE, but it sure ought to hold plenty of MPEG4s. I know it doesn't solve the whole UI problem, but it seems like a nice place to start on the storage problem... http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118

Size matters? How about this or this? An iPod, while nice, and a small size, these drives from LaCie also fit the bill and are much cheaper and possibly faster as well. Lesseee.....40 GB for 499 or 139....what do I want? I could see if these iPods were capable of showing the video as well, but since they can't...YET...it's just stupid.

Size matters? How about this or this? An iPod, while nice, and a small size, these drives from LaCie also fit the bill and are much cheaper and possibly faster as well. Lesseee.....40 GB for 499 or 139....what do I want? I could see if these iPods were capable of showing the video as well, but since they can't...YET...it's just stupid.

Yeah, it's also larger and heavier. If LaCie added MP3-playback to this, would you carry it around (maybe with a car batterie on your back)?

Just look at external harddrives specifications for model that support both USB2.0 and Firewire.

In all cases (were they specify actual transfer rate instead), firewire rate are always higher than USB2.0.

See this one for example.

Well the TARA archive is already slashdotted...
But I'm most interested in getting answers to these questions --
-- What's the license/use/citation policy? e.g. Can I make prints?
-- Can I buy/license a copy of the entire archive? (Perhaps loaded onto one of these).

...on how long till it becomes self aware?

5. Price. For once, Apple is not selling the most expensive product on the market. The iPod sells for very little above what the HD alone would sell for.

Unfortunately, that's not really true. I looked at getting an iPod when I was shopping for external firewire drives, but since storage was my primary need I couldn't justify getting 1/4 the storage for the same price as an 80 GB
La Cie PocketDrive. It is just a hard drive, but it is about the same size as an iPod and much cheaper. You do pay a premium to get the slick MP3 player built into the iPod (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not what I needed).