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320 Gig HD in 1U Of Rack Space
Mn3m0nic writes "Maxtor today announced a 320 gig rack mounted network storage server that fits in 1U (1.75") of rack space or 1 terrabyte in 5.25"." 14 bucks a gig. Can you stream video over a 100Mbs ether comfortably? Perhaps this is the backend for your DeCSS based DVD Jukebox? Or the mega Tivo extra hard drive (I s'pose that'd take some work tho). But you could fit a hundred or so movies on there... we're just inching towards it now.
Yep, sure is... if you need that much storage. However, neither Symmetrix or CLARiiON come in a convenient 1U (or even 2U or 4U) rack mountable form. If you're a small ISP with limited rack space, the Maxtor option would be a much better solution (as would the VA storage options, but they're very pricy, and not particularly dense, storage wise).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
As a sysadmin, the real question you should be asking:
"How the F**K do I back this thing up?!?!?!"
Sure it fits into a tiny rack mount, but the 25 tape DLT with robotic arm changer will take up the rest of the room!!! (OK, they have these things down to the size of a small refrigerator, but you get my point...)
Then exabyte, i think.
PigPog.
320 on the face of it looks like a big number... but i've got 45 in my own pc now.
Our flat (appartment) network already has a server with 4 20 gig maxtor disks and we've got 4 more 60 gigs on order.
That will give us about the same amount total diskspace although we intend to raid5 it and bring our total storage down to 0.25Tb (including the 10gig boot disk)
unfortunately, HD manufacturers want to impress us with how big their drives are, so it's really 1000 bytes/kilobyte for them, and so on. It didn't make much of a difference back when 1Gb was huge for a HD, but on the terabyte scale, those dropped bytes add up ...
- The government will take back all analog TV frequencies in 2006.
- D-VHS VCRs can't record digital TV because digital TV has digital rights management that "effectively controls access" to TV programming according to 17 USC 1201 (commonly known as the DMCA).
Best to get an S-VHS or Hi8 VCR (records at nearly broadcast quality) and use the converter box that the government will be handing out to analog TV users in 2006.<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
The 5.25" unit is a wonderful breakthrough, as we no longer need to use 8" winchesters on these desktop microcomputers. However, the OS just isn't up to it.
For a mere $5,000, the revolutionary corvus 5mb drive stores an amazing five *mega*bytes (thats 5,120 K) on your desktop. Unfortunately, dos 3.3 is quite insistant that disks are 143k, so this appears to your Apple as 35 separate disks on the same controller. There are rumors that the upcoming ProDOS will be able to use a disk this size, but this is rank speculation. Other rumors suggest that a revision to the new IBM PC will allow it to use similar units.
With such technology already here, we can only wonder what 1983 will bring. For now, though, we can certainly use this price effective--only $1/kbyte--mass storage.
:)
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Anyway, they want about a grand a month for a 42-U rack with a 12-month contract. Plus bandwidth. (They're charging about the going rate for bandwidth. Of course, you don't have to pay for the local loop, so you can realize a bunch of savings there.) 14- and 21-U racks are also available from them for about 1/3 and 1/2 as much.
Telco colo space is a lot more expensive. I've heard tales of guys paying $100K just to apply for a few units worth of rack space in a SWBell facility.
As for getting in to the business of being a colo provider, well, it's good work if you can swing it. The racks themselves (actually, they use cabinets with locks on them) are fairly inexpensive. However, in addition to the bandwidth requirements (which, on a bit-per-bit basis, don't cost near as much as you might think) you've got to provide power and air conditioning as well as physical site security. You also have to have a fairly substantial building as the key to success in that business is to get lots of customers to each buy their little slice of bandwidth. In CA, you've got to be earthquake resistant, here on the coast, you've got to be hurricane resistant. It takes some money to get started.
Uncompressed HDTV is about 1.5 gigabit/sec. Compressed (MPEG-2) HDTV is about 19 megabit/sec.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Hmm, what will *I* use for *my* mp3 server?
Also, that page is one of those God-forsaken meta-refresh-is-zero-seconds pages. Sites that keep pulling you back suck ass.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Wow. I explian that, in real life, storage capacities of hard disks and communication are usually termed in powers of ten, and that memory is in powers of two, and you sort of... flip out on me? No SHIT it's binary.
I have a VERY good idea of what I'm talking about.
We just bought 1 160gig, and 4 240 gigs! Shoulda waited another month. Anyway, here is my 60 second review.
They work great for storing this that don't require harddrive access speed, such as images (in my case...and no, not pr0n), or mp3's. They have a 10/100baseT connection to the network, and can share using nfs, or smb.
Bad: No Raid-5. This means your are forced to have at the least 2 volumes, at the most 4. One large volume would be nice. Also, you can't do both nfs and smb on the same share..either one or the other.
On the other hand...these things run freebsd and are hackable (in the good meaning of the term.) When I couldn't get the admin java applet to load on my system (my browser is hosed) I was able to telnet into the sucker and change the IP using vi to edit the text files on the system. I am sure with a little work, these things could be made into some interesting devices. I was thinking Apache/PHP in my case. Would make a hell of a web server for my low usage/high storage situation.
For the situations I mentioned they are good for, I highly recomend them. The price per meg can't be beat, but I question how good they would be for a general purpose envirnment where users would access them directly. The freebsd w/ telnet access is a plus.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Ummm you get a second one...?
That's why I'm using IDE for my lousy MP3 server and SCSI (RAID, probably) for my important machine that I need/want to be fast. It doesn't need as much storage space, but I want whatever space it does have to be disgustingly fast (and I don't want to do it in software, barf.)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
btw, 2^300 is 2.037+*10^90. I won't post the full number as it's easy to get in python (2L**300).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
How much longer is it going to be before the entire Deja archive can fit inside one hard disk slot?
Seastead this.
Disk drives do not work in 'bytes'. Low level software/hardware interpretes a constant coded stream of bits back into bytes for our convenience, as with a communication protocol.
The point, was that when you refer to, in most engineering docs I've ever read,
1 Kilobyte, that measn 1024 bytes if it's memory
and 1000 bytes if it's communication.
And it's rather up in the air for other media.
Can you stream video over a 100mbs ether comfortably?
.vob files, and play away with the DVD player in 'file' mode..
Yep.. I do it all the time with my DVDs.. Rip the sucker to disc, eliminate the unneeded
320G would hold almost 100 DVDs; Perhaps you should get one of these babies for the Geek Compound Anime collection!!
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Disk drives do not work in 'bytes'. Low level software/hardware interpretes...
Actually, every disk drive made within the past twenty years that I know of works in units of bytes called "sectors" or "blocks". Typically something like 512 bytes at a time. Anything smaller then that cannot be addressed directly; you have to read/write the entire block.
A serial communications line is just that: Serial. A sequence of bits. Disk drives and related devices are block devices, and function that way at a fundamental level. That is the difference you are missing.
1 Kilobyte, that measn 1024 bytes if it's memory and 1000 bytes if it's communication.
Communication lines are almost always measured in bits per second, and not bytes per second, so you generally won't see anything-bytes for comm lines.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
By the RIAA's calculations, that's enough to make an on-campus MP3 server that can hold almost 82,000 songs. Then, they could sue for over 2 billion dollars (at 25 grand per "copyright infringement"). Cool!
"...that fits in 1U (1.75") of rack space or 1 terrabyte in 5.25"
Precisely how many bytes is a terrabyte? Is it a single terrestrial byte? Perhaps one byte as big as the earth? Maybe a byte made of dirt?
I don't want a byte made of dirt. Perhaps I shall give it a squirt! Squirt that dirt!
But I digress...
1 - it costs 4 thousand dollars
2 - I don't have a rackmount cabinet in my house
-- Oh Well
Those meta-refresh-is-zero-seconds sites are why I open almost all links with the middle mouse button now. When I want the page to go away, I just alt-w it. I also usually run with Java and Javascript off to defeat the sites that try to open new browser instances. Those blow goats too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
(Since someone in the media's bound to come up with this, when Yotabyte drives are first released, I may as well spare them the trouble. Whata Yota Bytes!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Check out Exadrive. They're not shipping yet (AFAIK), but its 1.8 terabytes in 3U.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
You could indeed buy the DVDs cheaper. But you would need some really serious equipment if you wanted to JUKEBOX them, that is, be able to play any one without having to manually load it into a drive. THAT'S the motivation behind buying these big disks - the jukeboxing.
Tons of people like MP3s for this single reason alone. I only have a single CD player (as opposed to a 6 or 50 stacker, for example), and so when I'm in the mood for a variety of music I play MP3s with shuffle mode on. I just can't do that with my CDs. I listen to CDs when I feel like listening a single artist or album, and even then I sometimes just do it with the MP3s.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Hey, if this thing is 320Gb of Raid 1, that means it's got 640Gb of drives in it.
That means if you could turn off the Raid mirroring, you can double the capacity.
Wonder if it could be converted to Raid 5; assuming it's 8 HDs of 80Gb each, you could get 560Gb out of it with Raid 5.
I wonder if I can get any more possibly false assumptions based on limited data from a press release into this post?
-
Whilst this is a piece of technology and as such falls within the domain of "News for Nerds" it most certainly isn't "Stuff that matters" is it?
WTF dude, get the chip off of your shoulder. How the hell could a geek NOT be excited about 320GB of storage?
In my office full of geeks, I passed around this story and we were all pretty excited. We did a little math and it would easily hold all of our personal CD collections compressed to MP3. Hell, most of our individual collections would fit on there uncompressed. And then we talked about other uses for it (pr0n, movies, etc, etc) for 5-10 minutes. We decided you could fit contents of the average small record store, uncompressed, onto a couple of terabytes. A whole record store in less than $15,000 of storage.... jesus...
So yeah, I'd say it passed the "geek interest test". Good story!
Sure, maybe it's not as "important" as another GPL licsense violation story, but are we allowed to have some fun around here? Lighten up, dude. Take the rolled-up copy of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" out of your ass and enjoy being a geek for a change, OK?
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Hello, who flunked out of math class? Oh, I remember, the entire hard drive industry!
One terabyte is
1024 GB
1,048,576 MB
1,073,741,824 KB
1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
Yes, I know, they use decimal sizes to try and make their units bigger (pun intended). But why not measure storage devices the same way the programs do? That way, we can trust the hard drive manufacturers more than we do now.
On an offtopic note, I am returning my three-year old Western Digital 2.5GB hard drive for a replacement (the warranty just expired a day after I called for the RMA, but there's a 60-day grace period! WOOHOO!). Anyone know what happens if they don't manufacture the drive I'm returning? Will I get a 13.6 or just a refabbed 2.5? The IDE interface on the drive is only PIO4, so I'd appreciate something better.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hmm ... or, alternatively, you could spend $20 a pop to buy the actual DVDs, for less than 10 bucks a gig!!! (Possibly much less, depending on the length of the movie.)
This sort of bass-ackwards thinking reminds me of the classic Onion article: New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them On Monitor.
"Yes, the image is somewhat grainy and limited to just six frames per second," Welborne said. "But the technology will only improve as 466 MHz processors with more efficient Pipeline Burst Cache and Accelerated Graphics Ports with 10 MB VRAM become standard in the consumer marketplace. And when they do, the images will be remarkably crisp and detailed, every bit as good as that of, say, a 19-inch Philips-Magnavox TV."
"This is incredible," said Wayne Messers, a Huntington Beach, CA, systems analyst who sampled the Presario 6000 last weekend at the National Computer And Electronics Expo in San Diego. "I'm watching TV, but there's a keyboard in front of the screen."
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
The *only* place where 'storage' is measured constantly in powers of two is on-chip memory.
Ummm, right. And what do we have hard disks for? Why, to store data from on-chip memory. When you are storing units which are based on powers of two, it makes sense to use ratings based on powers of two. Gee, whodathunkit?
Communication lines are almost always (correctly) measured with powers of ten.
This is because communication lines do not work with bytes. A comm line is a bit stream. The only thing you care about is how many bits per second are comming down that wire. Things like bytes and frames and such occur at higher protocol levels and do not affect the bit rate of the line.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.