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The reason for not using tapes is exactly because of the compression. The time it takes to compress that data and then send the data to the tape takes a lot of time. That same process would have to be repeated on the other end.

Besides, using HDD for transfer means immediate access to the same data on the other end with speeds that are unmatched with tape backup systems. It might also be worthy to note that data sets that large usually are stored on large RAID systems like this one from LSI Logic, http://www.lsilogic.com/storage_home/products_home /external_raid/6998_storage_system/index.html, and are not installed into a computer like you may be thinking. It provides unmatched speed and reliability. A single rack system can sustain 1,600 MB of transfer to attached hosts, which is how Google will probably use it anyway. I highly doubt a single computer will be looking at that much information.

I have used several LSI boards, U320 SCSI (can't remember the model off hand) and MegaRAID SATA 150-4 models, and haven't had any troubles with Linux drivers. I am assuming you were talking about Linux anyway as you didn't specify. Also I have found LSI's support very helpful. If you are sure it is the LSI board that is the issue I would find the model number and call them up to see what they have to say. Their site is: http://www.lsilogic.com/ Their support site: http://www.lsilogic.com/support/tech_support.html

I have used several LSI boards, U320 SCSI (can't remember the model off hand) and MegaRAID SATA 150-4 models, and haven't had any troubles with Linux drivers. I am assuming you were talking about Linux anyway as you didn't specify. Also I have found LSI's support very helpful. If you are sure it is the LSI board that is the issue I would find the model number and call them up to see what they have to say. Their site is: http://www.lsilogic.com/ Their support site: http://www.lsilogic.com/support/tech_support.html

That was the original plan of HD-DVD, to be a better compression format of HD quality movies to fit on a normal (AKA: red laser) DVD. Actually, a format called EVD already exists in China which does just that, but we'll never see it over here. Apparently the disks would be playable in current computer DVD drives as long as you had the software. Good going HD-DVD and Blu Ray for not jumping on THAT, sheesh - that would be so bad for business if people could get higher quality movies without having to also buy another $600 player!

There are HD files floating around out there, lots of really good Discovery channel and BBC shows in 1280x720 XviD format that look great and *surprise!* they are 700MB files (for a roughly 40 minute show) that will fit on a standard CD.

No, you can't desolder an BPGA chip, without desoldering all other components on the same PCB. Forget the idea.

It'd be 1/100 of the cost to simply buy a new pc...

It is an encrypted signal. Assuming the system is not flawed like the similar system for encrypting DVDs...

It is an encrypted signal - HDCP. But I think you might be confusing the the AACS media content protection systems with the transmission content protection system. Once the HDCP protection is stripped (and there are many papers indicating the flaws in HDCP which would enable such a stripping process), all you've got is a raw DVI signal. The television doesn't know that it's a HD-DVD, or HDTV broadcast, or an HDTV camera feeding the picture - so the AACS stuff is pretty much irrelevant by the time it reaches the display.

Scrambled content is never intended to enrich the public domain, ever. So why is it provided with copyright protection?

Valid point - it seems that the studios, in effect, are saying that they wish to write their own copyright enforcement mechanisms (by virtue of getting anti-circumvention laws passed). Thus, to all intents and purposes, they are "opting out" of the standard copyright framework. It's an off topic issue, but it's still a good thought. That said, you can never really claim that all creative work is original (film makers/script writers/composers have got to come from some sort of cultural background - and that culture is fed by expiry of copyrighted works into the public domain). So the idea of "opting out" is fraught with problems.

On a practical note it I should mention that the signal on HDMI is not only encrypted, it is also the uncompressed HD signal. So even if you could decrypt it you would not have the storage capacity or processing bandwidth to handle it (eg re-compress). Whatever your datarate is for the disc, the datarate for the signal on HDMI will be about 100x higher. Eventually we will have that sort of storage capacity and corresponding processing capability, but not very soon.

Well, I don't think you'd stream the uncompressed content straight to a hard disk - the capacity is not the problem (around 5-6TB), but the bandwidth would kill most off the shelf disk arrays (~500 MB/s). You could, however, stream it to something like a HDTVxpress board, which would then spit out an MPEG-2 stream with an bandwidth of about 10 MB/s - which is easy. And these devices will be much cheaper by the time HD-DVD/Blu-Ray becomes prevalent (if that ever happens).

Is it me, or does the AtomChip Logo look a lot like the LSI Logic Logo?

Is it me, or does the AtomChip Logo look a lot like the LSI Logic Logo?

With RAID, you still have a single point of failure. Instead of it being your hard drive, it is now your RAID controller. So what is the advantage?

Since a RAID controller doesn't have moving parts, is it less likely than a hard drive to fail?

Although it costs an extra $80, the MegaRAID SATA 150-6 is really one of the best of its kind on the market simply due to its available battery backup support. IME, battery backup can really make the difference in terms of reliability, especially when you have controller caching enabled (particularly if you are using a DB/transaction work with RAID 5). Just a thought.

I like this one: MegaRAID SATA 150-4. Admittedly, I've only used it under OS X Server, as it's apparently what Apple uses in their OEM; but they do have linux drivers and I can only assume that they work as well, if not better. Straightforward setup on the CLI, and not too expensive.

Personally, for $300 I wouldn't screw around with a software raid unless this is your own personal box and the drives only have MP3s.

.
> Time is money.

Yup. And when you purchase a $30,000 vendor solution, your risk drops to near zero. When you build it yourself, you assume all the risk. What risk you say? Risk of costing you WAY MORE time than you expected to make it work.

Six months ago I and a few engineers were chomping at the bit to build a $3000 highly-available NFS server solution - two Athlon 2500 linux boxes each with 5 200GB HDDs running RAID-5 and Gig-E, dual mirrored boot drives. That's 1200 - 1600 GB of storage for $3000, instead of spending

I mean, everyone's doing it right, so it can't be hard to get working nicely? And it's TONS cheaper than a pair of similarly sized commercial rack-mount $15,000 to $60,000 systems.

Well guess how much support you get from some dumbass consumer grade SATA RAID-5 card vendors when the cards (both of them in both systems) act flakey as hell and repeatedly "drop" a drive or two every week only to rebuild them without complaint?

Jack shit.

Not only that, but our linux sysadmin took months learning every feature of the cards and setting up the array and setting up the HA-NFS solution. Don't get me wrong, a large part of the reason it took months was because building and tearing down terrabyte arrays is slow as molasses (we're talking about a full day just to rebuild one "dropped" 200 GB drive), but MOSTLY because our sysadmins were already overworked and just didn't have the time for it.

Oh, guess what? You discover that your RAID Card vendor's support for all the different variants of linux? DOES NOT INCLUDE the ability to rebuild drives while the OS is running and the array is in degraded mode. If a drive drops out your only option is to boot into the BIOS and wait 12 hours for it to rebuild a drive. It was only 6 months AFTER we bought the raid cards that they shipped an upgraded SUSE driver.

So, here's what we learned:

1) If you don't have a low-pay sysadmin with tons of spare time to work out bugs and hassle the vendors for support/replacements, you increase your risk.

2) If your company hasn't built this exact same solution once before using the exact bits of hardware and software that you intend to use, expect tons of unexpected hickup, which increases your risk yet again.

If you have the worst bits of both 1 and 2, you could luck out and be fine, or you could get seriously fucked when your boss asks you 4 months latter where the fuck the HA-NAS solution is.

Entirely separate from the software raid support, which sanely only does 0 and 1. 5 is awfully slow even with dedicated hardware, and you really don't want to even think about it in software.

Some people have had a surprising level of success uing the software raid potential of Linux to do this for some time, getting prices as low as $0.60US per GB.

Some slashdot articles on some previous attempts:
Bulk Data Storage For The Common Man?
Home-brewing a 1.2TB IDE to Firewire Monster

Books on it:
Managing RAID on Linux

Even applicable controller hardware:
LSI Megariad 150-6
3Ware 9000 series

And soon to be applicable storage hardware:
Hitachi Announces 400GB Hard Drive

We just added a couple of these at the office. We used a SATA RAID card from LSI Logic (formerly AMI MegaRAID) and on top of the 6-port device added six 200GB Western Digital drives. From that page, a 200GB Maxtor can be had for around $85.00. Add in a 2U case, which is probably the most expensive part at around $300.00, and you have yourself the most expensive components of what you need, subtract the motherboard, processor, and all that jazz (which can be had for another $300.00 or so). Running Linux LVM with Samba-3 and Winbind for full Active Directory integration and authentication on top of an ACL-enabled ext3 filesystem, of course! ;)

The problem w/ Software RAID is it depends on the OS, if you OS fails you can loose your data - I've confirmed this w/ Windows Software RAID at least, it's a real, real bitch to recover from if you have any OS problems (and no matter what anyone tells you Signed Disks in Windows are a horror story waiting to jump out at you).

As for forking $ for RAID cards, I've had really good experiences w/ the MegaRaid cards from LSI Logic - really, really good tech support and exceptionally inexpensive cards.

Nantero isn't publicly held, though, so this isn't a stock hype.

If Mylex cards are failing, that's important! If RAID cards fail, then the company, and all its employees, are out of business. And that's what apparently happened to Mylex. It's now owned by LSI Logic.

At the low end of the scale, we seem to be having the same kind of problem. We are having a high failure rate with Promise Technology FastTrak Tx2000 controllers. Promise Technology seems to have lost the will, or maybe ability, to deal with problems.

When I read through the comments to this story, there are a lot of situations where RAID cards are failing. But why?

The problem seems to be industry-wide. I talked to someone in technical support at HighPoint and he said the mirroring controllers sold by HighPoint have random mirror breakage failures, also.

This is a new problem. Did Microsoft do something to break mirroring controllers so that customers will buy Microsoft's far more expensive solution? Is there some problem with modern hardware no one has discovered?

One thing I can say is that, in the past, these cards worked reliably, or the companies could not have stayed in business. Promise Technology mirroring controllers were reliable for us for many years. Now they often cannot even be installed without failing during installation.

That's about what I did: get some IDE disks (4 in my case), get a drive cage capable of keeping those cool ) and hot-plugable, use a RAID-5 IDE controller and I had, with 120GB disks, 360GB space. Not extremly fast, but convenient. That box is my main server keeping all home directories, including lots of (Divx re-encoded) recorded movies/shows.

Nowawadays I would skip the RAID controller as it's potentially the single-point-of-failure in my setup. And instead of 120GB disks, I would choose larger ones.

My work has been setting up a FCA for the past three weeks using Linux and there have been some major problems. They have a fat array with 32 15k rpm U320 drives hooked up to a IBM x440 via 4 HBAs. The interesting thing is that no distro they've tried can transfer faster than Windoze due to Linux kernel and driver issues. I was a little shoked. The x440 has 8 Xeons w/hyperthreading. The more cpus that are enabled, the more the performance degrades. The sysadmin says he thinks it has something to do with single-threaded io calls in all Linux kernels - the more cpus try to access io, the more threads that get blocked. Me and the other sysadmin - Gentoo 'heads' - start scratching our heads wondering what all the Linux 'Enterprise' stuff is that everyone is talking about. And yes, these components were all given the 'good to go' stamp by all their manufacturers. Since the prob is with the kernel itself, this is kinda major.

I think that those 4 separate adapters controlling the drives are going to incurr 4 times the PCI overhead (grab the bus X4, send the data, release the bus X4) as a single adapter controlling all 32 drives would. And I think you would hit your I/O peak with one or two CPUs, assuming you are testing under no-load conditions.

Really, this argument has gone off the rails, because it looks like S-SCSI is point-to-point like SATA and not a bus. See this

For more info on Serial attached SCSI check out this page:

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/islands/sas_islan d.html

I haven't seen any IDE controllers that sport a 64-bit/66 MHz PCI bus interface. SCSI already has PCI-X dual-channel U160/U320 controllers. Check out LSI Logic

IDE RAID is fine, it's cheap, but with newer IDE drives pushing 50 MB/sec (sustained) you could max out a standard PCI bus with three drives. Need more throughput? Then you're stuck waiting for PCI-X IDE RAID controllers, or at least 64-bit/66 MHz versions. And in the meantime, SCSI will just get faster.

One quick comment... AMI recently sold their hardware RAID business to LSI Logic. See this page for LSI's RAID information.

One quick comment... AMI recently sold their hardware RAID business to LSI Logic. See this page for LSI's RAID information.

First off, I think you've made a number of incorrect assumptions. My views are based on years of corporate experience, including PC rollouts. Please read my responses below. Understand that I am the only person who gave you an useable, DOS/real-mode solution. And it's not as expense as you think.

SCSI is not that cheap! Perhaps for a home system, but my company is betting it's business on the systems that we buy. That means quality, reliability, and driver issues are a big deal to us.

So are mine! You think I've been fired for buying SCSI all these years? More $$$ does NOT equal quality. I go through specific products below ... (and note that NONE say "Adaptec" -- been burnt by their crap too many times).

Each change in a driver results in a different build of the OS image. If we use a no-name SCSI card, each time the support chipset changes we need to build a new image. This is very expensive for us to maintain.

All of the cards I use have quite stable drivers. Of course when you buy something new, you shouldn't expect it to work. You should always wait ~6 months for the bugs to clear out. But when if you'd waited 5 years for good Adaptec Linux drivers, then you'd get quite irritated.

You can easily standardize on one SCSI chipset, the TekRam TRM-S1040:

• Low-cost end-user boards, TekRam DC-3x5U/UW series:
  • $15-20 UltraSCSI TekRam DC-315U for internal/external SCSI peripherials (no BIOS) -- This is probably all you need!. Much faster, cheaper, better and more compatible than Adaptec's AIC-7850-powered 2906
  • ~$40 UltraSCSI TekRam DC-395U for booting devices (BIOS) -- cheaper and better than Adaptec's AIC-7880-powered 2930 IMHO
  • ~$60 UltraWide TekRam DC-395UW for 40MBps Wide devices (BIOS)
• Single driver for all boards in series
• Excellent, direct vendor cross-OS support, DOS, 9x, NT/2000, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, SCO, NetWare, BeOS -- including full boot disks for just about any flavor. Check them all out -- especially Linux, *BSD or BeOS users, never seen such support!
• Although the chipset is just over one year old, I have seen 0 issues with drivers since March of 2000.

We cannot afford to put a Zip, Jaz, CD-R/RW and DVD-RAM/RW drive on every PC in my office. Instead, we have one or more external ones and put a $15-20 TekRam DC-315U in each system. Works great! Also great for cloning when I don't want to hit my server/network too hard (in the middle of the day), let alone transfer loads of data between systems. In Linux, I can even load/unload the TekRam S1040 driver on-the-fly, flipping drives on/off various systems without a reboot/shutdown. It's _awesome_ bay-bee!

As far as other experiences, I recently had to chuck my Adaptec AHA-2940UW (AIC-7880) in my Linux server because it is a POS (in 6 years of using Adaptec on Linux, I have yet to have a good experience thanx to their non-direct support). The sucker refused to work properly with a new, $4,000 Exabyte Mammoth2 60/150GB tape drive (talk about "betting my company's business" on a SCSI card!). I replaced it with an $60 Advansys (now owned by ConnectCom) chipset-based card:

• $60 UltraWide SIIG AP-40 Pro -- also readily available at your local computer/electronics store (although you'll pay about $99 retail).
• Advansys is known for their excellent direct driver development, and broad OS support (first vendor to officially support Linux -- way back in 1995)
• Has full per-device configuration in BIOS, just like Adaptec (i.e. Ctrl-A at boot). Works much better and more compatible with more devices than Adaptec IMHO!

But if you need faster still, Symbios Logic (now owned by LSI Logic) is always faster and more ubiquious than Adaptec. So much so that Adaptec attempted to buy Symbios out (since they were kicking Adaptec's butt in the OEM and FibreChannel market). You'll be interested in the popular 53c895/1010-series:

• Mid-cost, end-user boards in the TekRam DC-390U2 series -- 53c895 Ultra2/LVD (aka Ultra80) chipset:
  • $100 TekRam DC-390U2B for single channel Ultra80/LVD (or UltraWide) channel
  • $130 TekRam DC-390U2W for single channel Ultra80/LVD and isolated UltraWide bus
• Dual-channel, 32/64-bit PCI end-user boards in the TekRam DC-390U3 series -- 53c1010 Ultra160/LVD chipset:
  • $175 TekRam DC-390U2W for single channel Ultra160/LVD (or UltraWide) plus single channel UltraWide legacy
  • $235 TekRam DC-390U2D for dual-channel Ultra160/LVD (or UltraWide)
• Symbios Logic 53c8xx-series supported natively in just about every OS -- many chipset are upward compatible (with exception of 53c1010 that requires a new driver -- but still better than Adaptec's cards, especially their newer ones)
• Better than Adaptec performance at any chipset/protocol (usually by an average of 5-10%)
• Widely supported, numerous OEMs, >10 year-old 8xx-series design/support
• The best damn cabling/converter bundle I've ever seen in a kit (boy is Adaptec stingy!)

And when it comes to hardware RAID, Adaptec is just NT/Netware-only. As such, I prefer DPT or, better yet, StrongArm ASIC-powered Mylex RAID controllers with broad OS support (and better performance too).

So what brand are you blindly putting your faith in? Eh?

SCSI hard disks are much more expensive than IDE. I just checked pricewatch, and a roughly equivalent SCSI drive was around $200 more than it's EIDE counterpart (36GB)

And those IDE drives can be put in a $20-40 enclosure and made to work at 20MBps+, right? Not! When it comes to external (isn't that what we are talking about, eh?), IDE is a joke -- with slow as molassas USB (even in 12Mbps/1.5MBps "fast" mode) being the only option (although new ATAPI-to-FireWire bridges, like this Ultra33 one from Intito, is changing that -- although it requires OEM firmware/programming). Plus we're back to the DOS/real-mode issue (even for FireWire). Only SCSI is "ready-to-go" external.

Now you can compare GB/$ all you want. You do NOT need the latest SCSI drives. Go with a late-model 9-18GB SCSI drive. I mean, how much storage do you need? We're only talking $100-200 for the drive, another $20-40 for the enclosure and another $10-30 for cabling and termination, max. You could do it for under $150, including cables and termination, if you pinch your pennies (and buy your stuff mail-order -- use Cyberguys for SCSI cables/terminators). Plus, you must be looking at 7,200-10,000rpm RPM drives -- don't make the mistake of comparing 5,400rpm IDE drives to obviously much faster SCSI drives.

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

I don't know about anyone else, but I have definitely never seen a laptop with 4-speaker sound output. I know there were some Powerbooks with 4-some speakers, but aside from that I've never seen any laptop with built-in sound that would be anywhere near what you'd want to deliver DVD sound to a home theatre.

You also want to keep in mind that the quality of the tiny amplifier and DA converter in most laptops is not up to par with the rest of the audio world.

On the video side, finding a laptop with a DVD drive isn't that hard anymore, but I imaging finding one that can effectively play fullscreen video with motion compensation may be difficult. You may want to consider a PCMCIA hardware decoder card like this one from LSI logic (look at the webpage, it seems like if you buy one, they even give you schematics for the thing! There is also the Margi DVD-to-go card, which I know little about. I also found one by Cadmus that looks promising.

There's also the DVD decoder card buyer's guide for PCMCIA cards, but that page seems to be thoroghally fubar'd from Netscape.

I wish I could afford some of this stuff myself!

I don't know about anyone else, but I have definitely never seen a laptop with 4-speaker sound output. I know there were some Powerbooks with 4-some speakers, but aside from that I've never seen any laptop with built-in sound that would be anywhere near what you'd want to deliver DVD sound to a home theatre.

You also want to keep in mind that the quality of the tiny amplifier and DA converter in most laptops is not up to par with the rest of the audio world.

On the video side, finding a laptop with a DVD drive isn't that hard anymore, but I imaging finding one that can effectively play fullscreen video with motion compensation may be difficult. You may want to consider a PCMCIA hardware decoder card like this one from LSI logic (look at the webpage, it seems like if you buy one, they even give you schematics for the thing! There is also the Margi DVD-to-go card, which I know little about. I also found one by Cadmus that looks promising.

There's also the DVD decoder card buyer's guide for PCMCIA cards, but that page seems to be thoroghally fubar'd from Netscape.

I wish I could afford some of this stuff myself!

I (heart, linked to an external RAID array and a couple of CD-ROM drives) SCSI.
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They should think about becoming more like Advansys who actually provide kernel tuning advice.
Or perhaps Symbios who have programming guides and real datasheets for much of their stuff.
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Basically Adaptec should spend some of it's time thinking about the customer now, not the the customer in a year that they are trying to create.
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