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320GB Hard Drives announced
SparkyTWP writes "Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn by announcing new IDE hard drives with capacities of up to 320GB. Prices will be between $300 and $400 and be commercially available by the end of the year."
How many years ago did 1TB of personal, home-based storage seem impossible?
Now the big question is: how do I back this up?
if these drives only have one year warranties, what use is a 320GB hard drive?
>>How do I back this up? With another hard drive, they're cheap.
Now I'll have 20k of useful e-mails, but a trash folder with 319Gb of spam.
Do we really need more space? Why not a 20,000 rpm spindle? We need SPEED. If we wanted space, we'd just get additional drives.
How long till people complain about needing more space?
Lots of flash and "Ignore the warranty behind the curtain..."
for ad-aware to scan my hard disk.
$8.95/mo web hosting
The article states that these drives will come with a 3 year warranty.
Could you fudge a RAID level 1 with this thing?
What about mp3's or .ogg's? More games? Surely there is something better to put on ones hard drive than porn.
Seriously though- pornography is not healthy. It tends to make think nasty thoughts and do nasty things- it is not good for the mind. I know it gets joked about a lot here, but that's the truth.
It'd be nice to see things a little cleaner around here. Maybe that's just a pipe dream?
Man, 100GB just doesn't go as far as it used too. Stinkin' RoadRunner is too dang fast!
Damn you, USENET and Kazaa! I need a DVD burner!
This actually appears to be a great, Fast media (compaired to lower end tape drives) for backup needs. No one person could really use all this storage in a home/personal computing needs (THAT ARE LEGITMATE). Although from a backup perspective, this would prove to be very useful, Buy two, Mirror them, and there you have it, Redundant 320GIG's of backup space.
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
imagine getting lost in "space"
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn
Shouldn't that be "Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more porn in order to fill the available space"?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
From the story:
These drives will also carry a three-year warranty.
huge capacities up to 320 GB for corporate archiving and media recording; and unique manufacturing and quality for 24/7 operations with mean time to failure (MTTF) rates exceeding one million hours.
Guess all you SCSI zealots are going to have to eat your hat.
All of our large archive arrays at work are already ATA. Not everyone needs high speed and large capacity, a lot of company's data needs just require a lot of space, and speed isn't too critical. ATA is stealing this market away from SCSI and tape very quickly. Maxtor is just filling this niche that already existed.
As a side note, 3ware already has a serial ATA RAID card out with 10 ports per card, and great linux support. 2.5 TB for $4500 in a single full tower case. Nice.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Hopefully, linus will accept the patch to allow 64-bit file lengths and offsets in the vfs.
So now it's possible to fit a thousand ripped movies on a disk instead of 500 - big deal. What the harddisk manufacturers should focus on is increasing RPM. The speed of harddisks is one of the slowest growing figures in all of the IT business - if not *the* slowest, and with bloatware abundant this means sluggish boot-up and starting of programs.
The 320 GB disk is even only 5400 RPM - that's as slow as the good old Bigfoot disks of times forgotten (Remember? they were the size of a showbox and a lot heavier...).
I guess this disk is good news for the P2P community, but for serious use it is of very limited interest.
I wonder what DoubleSpace would make of one of those...
this just announced: Microsoft will make it's new version of the Windows operating system, Windows .NET, even more bloated, so as to appease hardware makers.
They claim over 1 million hours, but where do they get that from? It's not direct experience or an average from lifetime testing as that's equivalent to well over a century.
This increment will help go below $1 per gigabyte, retail. The 120 GB disks have been hovering at $150-$200 in my area, not quite breaking it.
Excellent question. The answer to the backup problem is probably going to be (for those of us without an array of LTO drives) a USB 2.0 or Firewire enclosure around another 320MB drive!
Another possible option might be a hot-swappable, removable IDE drive bay. 3ware, still alive and kicking, makes them and the controllers to go with. Maybe even serial ATA will be an option soon.
Perhaps we'll see cheap hard drive carrying and storage cases catch on soon, or just differently specced drives specifically geared for archival purposes. Possibly they will have lower performance, but be more reliable and shock resistant?
Just an idea to throw out there for the low-budget crowd who likes random-access devices.
I keep reading all these announcements, and I know that I should upgrade.
In the meantime, I have a 10GB. I remember when I got it, it was huge. I'm talking, can't fill this up huge. I still don't have it even close to full. Why? I have a 6GB archos player for my mp3s and source code doesn't take up that much space.
What do people actually put on 320GB hard drives? I just can't fathom that much data. 6GB of mp3s was insane for me. One of my friends had 30GB of porn, but those were mostly divx rips. I find it hard to believe that the majority of people use this much, but they must or it wouldn't be commodity hardware. *sigh*
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Demand more! More, more more!
"Porn, porn, sausage and porn. Porn, eggs, bacon and porn. Porn, porn, porn and porn".
"Can I have it without porn?"
"Eeew, without porn? That's disgusting!"
Didn't you mean Semper FP?
How do you backup 320Gigs ??
A cheap tape drive on Ebay use DDS-2 tapes; that's 4Gigs max. Am I supposed to purchase 100+ tapes if I want a full backup and 7 days of incrementals ?
At $5 per tape, that's another $500+, plus the time it's gonna take to swap these puppies in the drive.
"Just buy another drive and RAID them..." Yeah, right. I got a few RAID horror stories for ya. "Well, who cares, you aren't running productions-grade stuff at your house..." Well, 320 Gigs of data takes a *long* time to accumulate, even with rips and all. Losing that would take you a good amount of time and bandwidth to accumulate again.
This is the case of one technology pushing itself out of usefullness.
I have the following conspiracy theory: manufacturers are afraid of releasing large capacity tapes at a low cost, because they would be ideal for pirating video. Why are DDS4 tape units so much more expensive than 8mm camcorders? Because one can store the content of four DVDs in a DDS4 tape? Hmmm...
Damn..
And there you have it. Movies take up space fast. My personal quest is to get all of Babylon 5 (never seen it before, so I'm hardly willing to pay $80 a season for these new DVDs just to see what all the fuss is about), but I'm sure everyone has their own little pet project, be it anime, action movies, whatever. Sure, I burn to CD on a fairly regular basis, but especially for a tv series, I want the cds to be sequential, so if there's a particular episode I'm having trouble downloading, I start building up a pretty big backlog.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Get a neighbour and allocate each other a quota on each other's boxes. Write a script to backup to a file. Encrypt them with gnupg. Transfer the files using any one of half a dozen protocols over the wireless LAN.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
that the 20GB hard drive I've been using to develop commercial 3D games for the last two years is less than half full.
Ahem.
Traditional fair use archives of digital entertainment? Like movies and music? I want a home server with all my CDs and DVDs archived on it so I can send the data to thin-clients around the house, like STBs. 160 GB barely is enough for my CD collection, and boy, do DVDs fill up a disk quick!
To argue that this is wrong because of defeating the DVD CSS in a DMCA-defying act is like arguing it's suddenly O.K. to roast Jews because Nazis in power passed a law saying so. (Yes, yes, Godwin's Law, and the concentration camps' purpose was somewhat hidden from the populace, so the analogy isn't perfect). The point is just because something is a law does not mean that disobeying it is wrong, or that obeying it is right. I provide a proof, in extremis, by example. Because this is possible it is reasonable to question whether any law is correct to follow or moraly bankrupt. Extreme and less extreme laws differ only in the difficulty of answering that question, and not whether it should be asked.
The DMCA, in many ways, is a horribly insidious law: it sets the precendent that something that can be used to harm is now illegal. I'd venture that anything can be used to cause another harm. The DMCA sets to stage for rendering all activity illegal, at the whim of prosecution and judge. Well, fuck, if everything is now illegal, I've got a lot less incentive to care if I obey the law -- obedience to arbitrary law suddenly becomes a very weak proxy for a moral compass.
The kind of person who thinks something should be enforced "just because" it is the law, is the same kind of person that stands around when innocent people are killed by the state. Not the kind of person I want standing near me.
You could've hired me.
It's becoming cheaper and easier to back up data using another drive.
Something that does worry me, though, how to use a second drive as a backup, yet be able to to disconnect it, so that something bad doesn't happen to it. (e.g. disconnect the drive, without having to reboot).
Doesn't do much good to mirror everything over to the 2nd disc, only to have your favorite IE exploit delete everything on your harddrive (and mirror)
Really, how much of that data is worth saving? How much of that data can't be re-created? If a fire broke out, what would you try to save? Me, outside of my photos (which the neg. are in a bank value) and camera(s), everything else I can re-create, and that which I can't, I have a USB flash drive.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
"40 megabytes of porn is enought for anyone" Bill Gates, 1980 or so.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Who says that raid can't run accross multiple machines?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
So submitting a story joking about porn will get you on the front page of Slashdot. Interesting.
I'm a photograper. At any given point there are usually 30 gigs of uncompressed TIFF files and 60 to 90 gigs of 12 bit RAW data floating around my room. Most, obviously, are kept on CDs... most computers cant simply comprehend the amount of space required for high quality imaging.
If they SERIOUSLY sell the 320 gig for 300$, it will be my newest HD. At less than a dollar a gig, its better than the staples deals with the 80 gig ATA133 maxtors...
Yes, you can need disk space for something other than MP3, DivX, and Porn.
Been putting together a covnergent system for a while now, with one of those Gateway Destination 36" monitors. A 320 GB will be perfect for recording TV shows at high quality without worrying about cleaning house every few weeks. One question, though: How long would it take to defrag 320 gigs???
Buy a removable hard disk bay - preferably an external FireWire bay. Buy an appropriately large second drive - if you have 100G of stuff buy a 160G drive.
Place second drive in bay. Connect bay to computer. Start to copy data, using normal OS copy tools. Go to bed.
In morning, remove bay from computer. Power down bay, remove drive. Put drive in static sheilding baggie that it came in.
Drive to off-site storage (e.g. friend's house, bank, whatever.). Place drive there, still in baggie.
Voila! You've just backed up your data. Assuming a firewire bay, card, and 360G drive at the listed prices, this costs about US$500.
If your system at home (craters|gets r0073d|gets a virus) then you can clean your system and immediately use the backup drive, while copying the data back over.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Home movies (and the requisite editing space). Do you honestly think they'll ever have a hard drive big enough for those first time parents and/or people getting married?
Combine that with the ability to back up your CDs and/or DVDs in full quality (no oggs or mp3s, aifs and vobs), and you've got a pretty neat thing on your hands.
Too bad about the warranty, though.
BlackGriffen
If you ask me, it's time for a change. We need to put the rotating harddisks in the attic and start using new technology stored in the big vaults of IBM and all the other major companies.
I'm getting sick of spinning things to store data. There is enough non-volatile stuff out there with bigger capacities then 320GB that can be IDE/SCSI controlled (if you want to keep on using that). Someone gave a reply about taing backups, well she/he's right. Spinning stuff craps out from time to time (how many times did you have to replace a disk in your server room?). How much cooling would an EMC need with those 320GB? Bet they will spinn a lot faster and thus produce more heat.
42 + 1 = 42
And I thought I could fit a lot of distros on my 75GB HDD. Boy was I wrong. I've got to buy me one of these. That way I can fit every Linux distro ever on my home computer.
Yeah, and the only time I even got close to filling my HDD was when I had 80 movies on there since I was too lazy to use my CD-RW. Somehow I doubt a normal "home user" will be able to use the capabilities of this drive. Well, unless IE 7.0 is a 200GB download.
A computer is a valuable tool, so use it and stop whining.
Oh my god :)
:) faster than we really need them sometimes. I never needed more than 20GB's although I never delete anything from my system.
..
..
...
I remember when I had about 8MB's in my harddisk and I was exitedly happy about it, and when we had 16MB's it was the biggest thing I can dream of.
It's funny how these things grow up fast
Well, but still, after some years, I will have 200GB, and they will announce the 2000GB and I'll not imagine it, and will say that 200GB was quite enough
But ah well, programms started to eat more resources, they just use more resources because they can sometimes, I've been running older programs lately and I found they had quite similar performance with really different size, *wonders*
Thanks for reading
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
The tears of mine
Tears of caveman nobody understand
I cry for dinosaur I could not kill
I tried to kill with arrow
I tried to kill with stone
I tried to kill with fire
I fail to the bone.
Mother and father why you mad?
All I tried to do was make you a glad.
How can I succeed, I never know
So I will stick my penis in this rock water hole.
Now I can finally backup my three harddrives (80 + 40 + 20 GB) in one time!
I think Slashdot does this to make me feel bad about recent computer purchases. That 200 I threw at the 120 GB HD sounds soooo good now. *sigh* Oh well.
What is music when you despise all sound?
According to the ITAR (international trade in arms regulations, or something like that), encryption is a weapon. The Second Ammendment says people have the right to have weapons. Therefore, the DMCA is merely something that enforces the Second Ammendment.
With drives getting so big, I am starting to wonder whether compression is even worth the while. You could rip your CDs to disk, without any patent infringing compression techniques and save processor cycles in the process.
One market that would really appreciate these drives is home movie making. With digital video cameras becoming more affordable, and more popular, these drive will be great for storing your whole library. Especially, considering that the price of DVD burners are unnecessarily high, as is the media and add to that the lack of industry wide standards (as opposed to one company wide standards).
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Anything that can be used for sex and something else, will be used for sex.
What about that barrier? IIRC, there is/was some kind of barrier which prevented people from fully use their 120(?)GB harddrives. Does anyone remember what I'm getting at?
Read the press release.
:)
It's all about "high speed access to archived data". Basically, they don't want people to bother with tapes (which are messy, slow...and generally irritating).
Maxtor want you to buy spare drives off them. Why bother spending 1000 on a DLT & 60 on tapes every time you want to take a backup. Stick a months backups on a 360GB drive, and take it home.
Hey, five years from now, people will have 10GB of battery backed up ram for secondary storage, and disks will just be used for backups
Why couldn't the sqeeze an extra 22 GB onto the drive so buying three would get me an even terabyte?
Not that I have any use for much beyond 10 GB, but hey...
will they come with earplugs?
Oh really? How about video editing? If you plan on doing any kind of video editing you will need HUGE amounts of drive space.
That's legitimate home use. And it requires a helluva lot of drive space (check the requirements for Cinelerra).
Personally, I think TiVo may not go the direction of the huge hard drive for recorded program storage.
With the pace of rapid advancements in re-writeable optical storage in the last four years, it'll be far more likely that by 2010 TiVo units will sport a 20 to 30 GB hard drive for the Linux-based OS, TiVo program code itself, and recorded program index pointers, then you'll see a 400-800 GB removable optical drive for the actual recorded program storage connected using a faster version of the Serial ATA interface. Such a device will finally spell the end of VHS.
Can't anyone come up with something more creative or interesting? I mean, if you actually need 320 GB drives to back up your pr0n collection, you've crossed over from pastime into obsession. That's more pathetic than it is funny.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
The speed of a drive consist of both raw transfer rate and seek time.
Let's look at transfer rate first:
If you double the density how will this affect transfer rate? Let's assume that the increase (it's doubled) in density is achieved by having sqrt(2) times more tracks and sqrt(2) times more bits in each track - a fair assumption IMO. The transfer rate of a new 5400 RPM disk compared to an old 7200 is then (5400*1.41)/7200 = 7636 / 7200 = 1.06. The 320 GB disk's transfer rate is 6% better - not very impressive.
The theoretical average seek time for the old 7200 RPM drive on the other hand is 1/(7200*2) = 6.9 ms compared to the new disk's 1/(5400*2) = 9.3 ms. That's 25% better - which I think is quite a lot.
In real life I think that you'll find an old 7200 RPM drive quite a bit snappier than a new 5400.
I can think of two legitimate uses for that amount of space.
toring video clips for editing is one. After all, we got a G4 Mac with DVD burner for a reason!
And second: I do a bit of engineering for a band. 24bit WAV files take up quite a bit of room, especially recording 4 at a crack! I've easily recorded 300+ GB in the past year, and it sure would be nice to have it all available without resorting to CD-R and DVD-R.
More storage, I say!
As for back ups? That's why I bought a motherboard with on board IDE raid!
So, don't assume that it will be used for Porn!
"Actually, I enjoyed this in the same vague, horrible way I enjoyed the A-Team" P. Opus
I remember when we had 1MB drives.
And we had to spin the platters by hand.
In the snow.
And we were happy about it too.
In a few years the minimum drive space needed to install Windows and Office will be 10+ gigs. :)
"The demand for instant recall of archived data is expanding as companies are meeting their obligations to quickly access executive e-mails, financial documents and transaction records," said Mike Dooley, senior director of marketing for the Desktop Products Group at Maxtor. "Users may not need to access information in these applications on a daily basis, but when they do need access, it must be instant. Recent advances in ATA technology and our manufacturing processes allow us to build upon our legacy of experience and provide our customers with a family of premium ATA hard drives that can be integrated into a variety of systems for these enterprise applications."
Instant recall? Please, what a joke. Even at 10,000 RPM it would take forever...
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
Yeah, DMCA sucks and big brother watches you ;)
DMCA comes into computers first, then when they
invent necessary technology they start to implant
chips into human to enforce laws and adjust person's
attitudes, morals and actions, making us all a large
ranch of sheep whom are controlled by the evil mad men who want to control the world and thats where humanity goes all wrong ;)
Ok, to seriously speak i hope DMCA never will work =) besides DMCA is developed by Microsoft, ok naturally they will atleast leave a backdoor for them, FBI, CIA, NSA and other goverment agencies which need those. Perhaps goverment doesn't prohibit a backdoor for Microsoft but requires it for FBI, CIA etc... Microsoft will make they'r own backdoor hidden then to just gain more cash, crush linux and finally control the sheep or something like that ^_^ And besides DMCA enforces laws and thats a bad step to take, imagine if humans had implants in they'r brain enforcing laws, imagine that... well that will never make thru i think bbut still DMCA is a step forward to it... and people will be enforced to use MS products =( or perhaps not, we will see... we will also see how easy(or hard) it is to circumvent DMCA...
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
As I state here. Increase in density is 2-dimensional (area) while transfer is 1-dimensional (line).
Do we really need more space? Why not a 20,000 rpm spindle? We need SPEED.
Then why are you buying IDE and not SCSI? 15K RPM is old-hat in the SCSI world.
If we wanted space, we'd just get additional drives.
Again, an area where SCSI shines. It's tough to put 48 IDE drives in a PC-clone case!
I agree. If those are the criteria one has, one can get SCSI RAID devices, or just plane SCSI host adapters, and achieve those results. The rest of us, who need speed but not blinding speed, get by just fine with much more affordable ATA100 or ATA133 IDE drives, or hybrid approaches like 3ware which allows an array of such drives to appear like one very large, very fast SCSI drive.
What we do need is space that is reasonably fast, and reasonably affordable. I do plenty of video editing (home videos, shows I record and delete the commercials from [no, I won't trade them with you, sorry. I stay within the law and build my own video library from public, legal sources], etc.) and, more importantly, I like creating 3-D animation sequences in 1080p HDTV format using blender and povray. The RAID 5 array of 120 MB disks I have is very nice, yielding a sweet 0.6 TByte of data, but frankly I've been finding that a bit constraining, and have had to delete some video 'source' material (rendered high-def PNG files from wich some HDTV avi's were generated) to make room for other projects.
I'd love to replace them with 320 GB drives, for a cool 1.5 TB or so of space, and, frankly, the 3ware RAID controller and the ATA100/133 drives attached to it are more than fast enough for all of my video capture, editing, and rendering needs. 20,000 RPM wouldn't just be superfulous, it would probably be detrimental in terms of the expected disk life and heating issues within the case.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Ok, I fully understand the need for speed. I'm itching to get SCSI Ultra320's myself for the Mac... Let's be honest though -- 10 or 20G is a CRAP LOAD of data. My only suggestion (locally or corporately) would be to learn to departmentalize your info. Keep it in chunks you can manage. I have recently out grown my DAT tape drive(s) for their usefulness in both speed and size. What's the next serios option? DLT of course. For business backups at the minimum you'd need two tape drives (one on site, and one off -- always testing/using both). Then add in the tape library which for me would be at least 15 tapes (assuming 1 tape for 1 complete backup). Of course these tapes should be replaced/re-cycled yearly (IMHO). I found my solution works to save me money and time. Take a old computer and throw a couple of these huge drives in there and set them up under Linux as a RAID-1 array. Repeat for offsite system as well. Today all my backups go to this system. As these drives can EASILY handle 10M/sec (100Mbit network currently) they're faster than tape. Moving the files to a temporary drive (I use a 30G Lacie with a Mac myself) is easy enough and can be done during normal business hours without bothering anybody (I don't even notice on the Mac as I use it while grabbing last nights dump). So now I have the backup onsite (RAID-1). I chose RAID-1 to keep cost down, but my sanity up. The systems themselves (being backed up) are RAID-5 based and more powerful by far. I also have a backup in hand at all times (though covering less time). Then dump it offsite to the other RAID-1 system. For me the corporate data here, which covers a DECADE and is kept "clean", is just 4G daily. 30 days sits on 120G no problem. 320G will be very helpful as 4G/day will obviously just keep growing. With this new drive my data set can increase 150% and still hold 30 days worth of live backups. I'd be more interested in seeing these drives in SERIAL ATA format with nice cabling. Trying to shove four drives (1 boot HD, 1 CD, and then I like 2 for the RAID-1 data _only_) into a computer and fight the ribbon cables is a freakin' joke. That the ONLY problem I've found with this solution so far... Thoughts?
320gigs of storage is over kill. Especially with the way I kill hard drives (5 in 6 years), a 320gig drive just isn't practical. People would be better off buying a ton of memory than a 320gig drive. Atleast in my case, lots of disk caching reduces the lifespan of a drive dramatically. Having a ton of memory improves performance and the life span of the drive. Now if they can get 4gigs of Ram down to 400.00 I'll be jumping for joy.
This would be great if it weren't from Maxtor. I don't trust their drives as far as I can throw them. I've had three go bad so far (they start making a squeaking sound and fail to spin up). Mac users in particular have been having trouble with them.
If we wanted space, we'd just get additional drives.
Yes, because 100 little crappy 10 GB drives is certainly preferable to four 320 gig drives in RAID-5 configuration.
Slashbots never seem to consider the sheer lunacy of what they post.
- A.P.
"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?"
Hmmm...320 GB HD...Time to remake the old Jukebox into a movie Jukebox.
No more getting up to change the DVD out when my entire (legal) collection of DVD's are already set up ready to play.
Instead, I'm forced to eBay, where I pay $8 shipping on a $40 drive...
I don't want/need 80GB! I just have a stinkin' cheap, 8-20GB drive!
We need a more efficient defrag program for drives of this capacity. I have a 40GB drive now, and even with separate partitions for incoming (P2P) downloads, the OS, etc, it takes forever to defrag. How's anybody going to defrag this monster ? Sure you can use more efficient file systems, but that only reduces fragmentation.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
"The ATA drives offer a great value, low cost per GB and when integrated into storage systems and file servers offer a compelling cost-effective alternative to tape libraries and optical drives, which have been the traditional solutions used for near-line applications."
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Why not buy two drives, make one internal, and slap a removable drive conversion kit on the other. Every so often, put the removable HDD in the computer, dump your internal drive to it, then remove it and store it in a safe place?
Anything wrong with that? Just be careful not to bump it too hard!
FLAC'd Albums take between 200 and 500 MB depending on the kind of music and how long the album is. Since the encoding is lossless you never need to re-rip (as countless 128k MP3 fans have had to after their hearing adjusted and the artifacts started to annoy them) but you do need to buy more disk space in proportion to new album purchases.
Even at current prices (and they'll keep falling) this means a FLAC costs you $0.40 extra compared to storing the MP3. When another big price cut arrives I'll buy an identical disk and go RAID for the extra peace of mind.
I also cache DVDs on disk in case I don't get time to finish watching them before they go back. After I've watched them they go in the trash, but that still means I need 2-8GB of slack space.
Finally doing proper audio recording eats a lot of space. 8 x 4 minute tracks @ 48kHz is hundreds of megabytes - and every time you apply a global effect the whole LOT gets pushed to the Undo stack. I can use 4-5GB just learning how the tools work, I'd bet a semi-pro setup (for a local band say) would get plenty of use out of a 320GB disk.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
...cause I just don't care anymore...not about karma and less and less each day about this site.
Lets be honest, its going downhill fast. The posters are double posting with regularity, stories are old news half the time I read them and now we have product placements as ads on top of the already increased ad-space.
Its really too bad, this used to be a great site. Here come the flames....
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
You'd have to partition it, right? How many partitions could you/would you have to make on this thing? A lot, I'm thinking.
N/T
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Wow, that's a lot of megs!
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
I usually just read the news, read the good posts and ignore the morons, but I cannot stand it any longer. What is with these people that can find nothing good and plenty of bad in EVERY story posted here. I am convinced that if there were a cure for every type of cancer discovered in one little pill that is a single dose and cost five bucks, these same people would bitch and rant that it's "nothing but trouble", has a "crappy warranty" or "is just a ploy by (enter corporate entity name here)". Are these people sitting at home...unemployed....in Greenland? They obviously aren't terrbily bright. "Great, tons of storage space to use to my hearts desire. Now how am I going to back it up?" as if Maxtor is responsible to NOT bring out new technology unless complementary technologies have already surpassed it. How do you back it up? With another drive you jackasses. With 4 of them if need be. When I put in a Linux box for a small business customer with 4 120GB drives in it, I had to come up with a way to back the thing up that was inexspensive (this was a small business, they weren't going to go out and buy an AIT3 drive) and fast (that's a lot of data to back up. The solution? Buy a case of Maxtor 160GB external firewire drives and tar the damn thing to them. How freaking hard was that. For pete's sake people...I think half of the slashdot readers need to just throw in the towell and go hang out with the rest of the unemployed Circuit City tech's over at F***edCompany.com!
Back in 1991, my roommate got a new 486sx that trounced my 386dx-33. Mine had an 80MB hard drive, and my roommate had something like 200MB, I don't remember exactly. I knew that he wouldn't be able to fill it up. Now I have more memory than that in all my machines.
There are many things that could easily fill this drive up fast. Even when people talk about having a terabyte on the desktop, you just have to be creative to figure out how to fill it. What if everyone had a TiVo-like device where the TV stations sent you your favorite programs that you could watch whenever you wanted? Record every show on multiple channels. Movies maybe.
You have to think outside the para-diggem. :-)
Right now you watch TV in real-time. In 5 years, what if you had the ability to simply store everything that was sent and watch it later? Not only one channel, or multiple channels, but all channels? That might take up some HD space, huh?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Get a removable IDE HDD conversion kit. Put one disk in your PC in a permanent mount. Put the other in the removable kit. Plug the removable HDD in periodically and dump your primary drive to the removable drive. Put the removable drive in a safe place -- just don't bump it too hard! Voila!
Good point, but I think that even if the public at large knew and understood all the implications of the DMCA, they wouldn't care. And if they did, the trend these days seams to be "...this law can't be that bad... that one's worse." So, they wouldn't complain if they did care.
It's probably fair to say, unlike those of us who are geeks and can imagine obvious uses to technology that would make our lives easier, more convenient, and just plain mor fun, the average Joe and Jane are totally clueless: denying them something they don't even know is possible does not seam like a great loss. The average person still thinks of content in terms of storage media (well, perhaps todays kids with MP3 players are more "with it", but they don't vote, er count, er, vote).
I brought up the extreme example I did for a reason: more and more, when I object to some bad legislation, the voting lemmings come out in droves and argue, "It can't be all that bad -- they aren't killing people, after all." The only merit that argument has is that, yes, there may be greater attrocities out there. But, fighting for the small freedoms, before they are lost altogether, makes it easier for organize and fight for the big ones. Freedom of speech, and assembly may be "little" freedoms, when compared to losing one's life, but with out them, and the ability to rally against a large common threat that they facilitate, one's life suddenly becomes a lot easier to lose. So is it too, with the freedom to maintain personal libraries -- the knowledge they contain can be frivolous enttertainment fluff, or historical documents.
Imagine a future where everything you learn is "the state", and can be erased with a mind DMCA implant (as someone else suggested). Me, I uh kinda want to be able to backup what I know, ya know.
You could've hired me.
These are only $300/pop, that's around 1/10 the price per gig of a SCSI RAID. And $1/Gig is still doing pretty good. I paid $95 for an 80 gig just a month ago.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
- Pentium 4 2.8GHz by michael with 374 comments on 4:41 Monday 26 August 2002
- P4 2.80GHz Overclocked to 3.917GHz by CowboyNeal with 380 comments on 5:30 Thursday 29 August 2002
- Pentium 4 2.8Ghz Review by CmdrTaco with 186 comments on 10:19 Monday 26 August 2002
- Pentium 4 2.8GHz by michael with 374 comments on 4:41 Monday 26 August 2002
- New AMD Athlon 2600 Processor Released by chrisd with 420 comments on 8:25 Wednesday 21 August 2002
- AMD's Athlon XP 2700+ by CmdrTaco with 310 comments on 11:14 Thursday 29 August 2002
- AMD Introduces the Athlon XP 2200+ by chrisd with 304 comments on 8:30 Monday 10 June 2002
- 320GB Hard Drives announced by CmdrTaco with 256 comments on 9:13 Tuesday 10 September 2002
- Maxtor Announces 80GB Platters by CowboyNeal with 367 comments on 17:05 Thursday 05 September 2002
If this is indeed what is happening, I really think it should be disclosed in each story that it's a paid advertisement. If they're not advertisements then these are just really shitty stories, and they should be put in a "product announcement" category so they can be filtered out.In any case, I would like to hear from Roblimo, CmdrTaco, or someone able to give an authoritative answer.
rooooar
The same way anybody backed up the equivilent amount of data before, except that before it was using multiple hard drives to achieve the same capacity.
The amount of available data probably won't change much, as before getting this much storage would have been possible anyways, just not on a single drive. Now you've got multiple partitions on a single drive instead of multiple spanning a few drives. Speed-wise it may still be better to get 2-3 smaller drives anyways. Or you could try using Raid with 3 of these puppies, if you feel like shelling out the cost in triplicate...
Anyways, I'm hoping that (for home use) you won't be filling this puppy to the brim right away and then needing to back it up. It's data used that gets backed up, not the actual capacity of the drive...
So in ten (10) years we've gone from 120MB hard drives to 320GB.... wow........ what's next???
use CPAN;
Cable's Black and White
We're going to need a Librarian from Snow Crash to manage all that data. Right now I have problems finding stuff that I have in my email box, with the search tools. I can only imagine that once my data collection goes beyond the current 200mb that I have, that finding what I need is going to become very interesting.
Maybe Be's solution- the file system is a db would help...
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Here's a doomsday scenario for the RIAA: backup devices finally catch up to hard drive space, in terms of size and speed. Meanwhile, the RIAA begins busting individual traders........ or at least trying to. All it would take is backing up a 320GB drive to tape(s), and then sending a copy of the tape(s) to contacts beyond the legal reach of the RIAA. Guerilla pirating at its absolute worst.......... in the RIAA's eyes, of course.
To argue that this is wrong because of defeating the DVD CSS in a DMCA-defying act is like arguing it's suddenly O.K. to roast Jews because Nazis in power passed a law saying so. (Yes, yes, Godwin's Law, and the concentration camps' purpose was somewhat hidden from the populace, so the analogy isn't perfect).
For the information of those, like me, who had never heard of Godwin's Law, it states: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
Backups.
I work at a University, where a lot of infrastructure support is geared towards research. Physicists like to collect enormous amounts of data, but they also expect us to be able to back it up and store monthly archivals going back three years.
It's relatively cheap to put up a nice raid-5 external scsi storage chassis -- about 1Tb of space would cost slightly over $10k. Most research groups can easily come up with this amount of money, however we end up turning them down because we cannot afford to back up that much data. Tape drives are NOT cheap. Tapes are NOT cheap either. Moreover, while drive capacities have been increasing steadily, tapes haven't been able to catch up at all -- AIT3s are currently 100G uncompressed, and with the data physicists like to produce, we cannot rely on the 2:1 compression to hold true. To be able to back up 1Tb of data we would need at least 8 tapes and at least an 8-tape changer.
Add to this 30-60 AIT3s for daily backups (~$5k), plus 8x12x3=288 AIT3s for a 3-year monthly archival storage, and you quickly run into SUBORBITAL amounts of money which research groups expect us to come up with. I mean, we're talking ~$10k for the 8-tape changer, and ~$25k for tapes. The fact that it takes us ~$40k to back up $10k worth of storage is something that a lot of people don't realize, especially not the faculty.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Robert X. Cringely announced today that he is using the world's first "computer without an operating system."
Details at 11.
"And like that
Do we really need more space? Why not a 20,000 rpm spindle? We need SPEED. If we wanted space, we'd just get additional drives.
Standard "correct me if I'm wrong but be nice" disclaimer here...
It seems to me that greater arial density of the data on each platter means that you'd get more data going coming through the pipe on each rotation vs. a smaller capacity drive that has lower data density.
So a 320GB drive would be pumping out more data per rotation than an older 80GB drive-- therefore, a 7200 rpm drive would have faster linear throughput (though not necessarily faster access times) than the 80GB drive.
I don't have any math here to back this up-- but it probably explains why my 80GB Western Digital (with 8MB buffer) outperforms my RAID 0 setup of dual 20GB IBM drives. I don't think it's all from the big cache but I'm getting roughly 50%-100% better real-world throughput out of the single WD drive (measured in the time required to load a bigass wav file into Soundforge). There are probably other factors involved (cpu utilization, crappy RAID drivers, etc) but I think arial density has a lot to do with it.
This also means that the lower-capacity versions of the 320GB drive will be the same speed as the 320 -- they'll have the same arial density, but fewer platters.
I wonder what the arial density (expressed in capacity per platter) would have to be for a 7200rpm drive to reach the theoretical maximum throughput of ATA133? I could figure it out, but I don't really feel like doing math right now.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Just think how much data you can lose in a single drive failure now! Good luck backing it up without going broke.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
A new disk technology these days goes commercial at the high number, then falls in price as it matures. The introduction price threshhold seems to be around $300-$400. So you had to wait for 300+ GB disks for $1 / GB.
90 days? ;)
There is a whole subset of engineering relating specifically to predicting failure and testing.
Lets say we have 10 pieces, after 10 hours 1 fails.
We can predict 10% failure after one hour.
If we ran the test twice as fast as the application, we could guess that we'd get 10% failure after 2 hours.
If we know from history that the failure rate follows a certain relationship, we could predict when the rest of the failures will occur.
10% fail at 2 hours, 50% may fail at 15 hours.
Using these methods is how reliability and predicted life is calculated. When they design a car to last past the warranty (which they do) they don't build 100 prototypes and drive them that distance.
They take the components and run accelerated testing and use statistical models to extrapolate the actual performance. (Along with all the proper design work of course)
then when they invent necessary technology they start to implant chips into human to enforce laws and adjust person's attitudes, morals and actions, making us all a large ranch of sheep whom are controlled by the evil mad men who want to control the world
First of all, you need to not rant, ever again. Take a breath, stop drinking coffee, use more punctuation, take a high school creative writing class, and quit being so paranoid. America is governed by people, and while the government occasionally passes laws that many of us oppose, in the end, we win. Because we, the people, decide stuff. If we don't want implants in our brain, no government on earth is going to put them in. There's an ebb and flow to government, they do their thing and usually, we're pretty complacent about it. But if they go to far, that's when it's time to bust some heads. Americans won't stand for their rights being taken away, by our government or by others. We are willing to put up with some things, but you can't just blindly grab for power, because if you do that, America will rise up and kick some major, major ass. Be you the government, foreign entities, or a huge, monopolistic corporation, you go to far, you pay the price.
Yes, but until a supposed law requiring such implants is repealed (which means it no longer has force) or is declared unconstitutional (which means it never had force), disobeying it would be illegal.
Far too many people derive their moral compass from what is and is not illegal, and that is a dangerous trend when it comes to getting rid of bad law. Occasionally, the will of the people does require them to act illegally.
You could've hired me.
Id not trust MY business on IDE drives..
Give me a scsi Raid box.. nothing less.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'll take two of those and replace the 120Gb drives in my Tivo (have to look into if they'd be supported.) Bless them both and let's see...that's 400+hours of high quality (not best) video. What for? ST:TNG, SNL and Junkyard Wars! ________________________________________________
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
The press release says something about Mean Time To Failure in excess of 1,000,000 hours?
114 Years? Ok. Never had a drive last that long . . .
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
At the bottom of this page though it says that the drives come with a 3 year Warranty and 1 million hours MTTF.
about /. at times like this, some people are incapable of admitting that they have a failure of imagination when it comes to evaluating the usefulness of technology like this.
...and as for the "but there's no way to back it up" whiners. Oh, please. Use your imagination. Here's the system I use:
Do you need 320GB for your open source projects? Of course not. However, there are *tons* of valid reasons to need this kind of space.
1. DVRs: store hundreds of hours of video. All fair use.
2. Photoshop. Many of the projects I work on generate files in the hundreds of megabytes. Very high resolution. Often projects run to a few gigabytes. Home use? It is for me.
3. Archival. For years, I've had to purge old projects off to CD, and just delete them altogether when I was getting tight on disk space. Now, with modern 160GB+ drives, I can have everything at hand. Forever.
4. iMovie. 'Nuff said.
5. ??: Who knows? No one's ever been able to put this kind of storage into people's hands before for this kind of money. Who knows what we'll come up with in a few years?
(1) 160GB internal drive for daily use.
(2) 160GB external firewire drives, one of which I use for incremental backups of the main drive, nightly. The second I store at an off-site location, and bring in once a week or so to back up the main drive directly, also incrementally. Both external drives are only connected during the backup procedure, and disconnected afterwards.
Perfect? Of course not, no system is. But it's safe enough for what I'm doing, and protects against the things that scare me most: 1. catastrophic drive failure, and 2. fire, theft, etc.
Come on, it's a procedural problem, not a technology problem.
Frankly, I think tape drive suck. Most of the time, you don't find out if they're working or not until it's too late. With my system, I can just plug the drive in, and check out the files. And what if you just need that one file which you accidently threw away? Easy on an HD, pain on a tape. That and the wearing on the heads leads to a limited life span, tape and drive...
of course, all this is IMO...
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
From a press release i received from Maxtor yesterday....
Effective October 1, 2002, all Maxtor desktop drives will carry a one-year standard warranty.
If they dont believe in their drives... why should I?
1985:
"Someday, computers will be able to store and transmit huge amounts of literature, art, and music. A new golden age of learning will again be ushered in. Students will be able to study rare works that would otherwise be unavailable. Why, not long from now the Library of Congress will be able to fit on a few compact disks, accessable from any personal computer!"
2002:
"Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn by announcing new IDE hard drives with capacities of up to 320GB."
May we never see th
Currently the IDE bus on the Tivo is limited to 137 GB. Even the 160 GB or 200 GB drives have limits in a Tivo. There is talk of Kernel mod that will recognize the larger drives, but there have been issues. There are rumors of a quazi PCI add on card to allow larger drives and RAID5 in an external chassis, but you would lose your TurboNet card, if installed.
Old7
And that's a perfect example of the kind of ignorance and stupidity we face: someone who can't recognize an existance proof by example, in extremis.
The point being made, oh dim anonymous one, is that just because something is a law does not mean it has to be followed blindly: there exist laws which should not be followed. As with most existance proofs, it is usually involves a boundary condition -- in this case, an extreme socio-political situation.
The interesting question then becomes, if there is some law which should clearly not be followed because of the depravity it represents, are there less-depraved laws which should also not be followed? The implication is that there may be a line to be drawn. Given the existance of such a line, it stands to reason that debate of whether a particular law is on one side or the other of that line is worthwhile, and just becase there may be a more deprived law does not mean the answer is no. (By analogy, if this were case, rape would be legal because it was not murder, and murder would be legal because it was not genocide. Genocide, of course, is legal when the "other side" does not do it to you first. See where this goes? Not a nice place.)
Those that decry an activity simply because it is illegal need to learn that while the law can be a useful proxy for a moral compass, it is not an absolute one, and should be questioned. In fact, effective participation in a democracy almost demands that all laws be examined to determine who they benefit and who suffers by them. It is a sad state of apathy that hangs in the air when people only care about extreme laws.
You could've hired me.
I ran some numbers on this recently. I was looking just at DLT vs. VXA. All prices US Dollars. This doesn't include the price of the drive, because that is relatively minor.
For VXA-1, tape costs about $2/GB, retail price (you may be able to do better).
For DLT-IV, tape costs about $1.4/GB.
For VXA-2, tape costs about $1/GB. About the same for AIT-3.
If you can find decent and not too expensive hot-swap drive carriers, those 320GB drives at $300 USD almost start looking good for backup media themselves! They could be close to $1/GB if the carriers aren't too expensive.
All that above was uncompressed storage. Compression can cut those prices in half if you can use it with your data.
HDs can backup data real fast, especially if you're using rsync. The problem is the drives themselves are more fragile than tapes. Though you can easily damage a tape by dropping it too (especially DLTs). Tapes are a bit better in terms of temperature range. Dunno about long-term archival storage. CDs or some other kind of optical would be a better bet than any kind of magnetic media for long-term.
...these 80gig platter drive to be available with separate read and write heads on different arms - and separate ones for each platter. Then sell them in a box of three of 160gig drives, two platters each, with a PCI controller that will automatic handle the RAID 0+1 configuration. That is 160 gig, with hardware redundency with a spare drive to have for WHEN (not if) one fails. The striping and extra heads will make the data FLY - and you don't need more spindle speed.
Right now I have two 240 GB drives and I need MORE TIVO.
Digital Video Editing.
MiniDV gets ripped to your pc at i think 6gb/hour, or maybe its 13, but whatever it is i fill up 120 gb drives quickstyle
You are obviously a pornographer in search of a medium to hold all your surround-cinema lesbian strap-on orgy pictures.
All pornographers are cheap bastards looking so save cash for the cheapest data storage. People like you keep IDE harddrives alive. My recommendation is you should invest your time/money in those Maxtor 320GB Harddrives.
I am a Gnu hippy and require the highest of quality data storage and performance. I may wright software for pennies, but that leaves me incentive to save money for higher-quality hardware. I utilize Ultra160 SCSI harddrives. Adaptec Ultra160 rocks!
I'm sick of people in this thread (and others) suggesting that RAID is somehow an alternative to a backup stored at a secure remote site.
How will RAID help you when someone steals your computer ?
I've seen PSU's pop and blow a machine (drives as well) again RAID isn't going to help you here.
RAID is a useful tool, but it is not a backup solution (unless you have another one stored off-site)
MTBF is not an estimate of how long the drive will last. Rather, it's an estimate of the failure rate of the drives during the expected lifetime of the device. Once you exceed the expected lifetime, which is often on the order of a couple of years, the anticipated failure rate increases. If you have new drives with an MTBF of 25,000 hours, and you run 1000 units for 100 hours, you can expect to see four of them fail. It does NOT mean you can expect them to run for 2.8 years and then all fail at once.
Yup, the 3-year warranty is what really makes this drive a winner. Should have been mentioned in the original story.
first of all that part once just like a joke not some real opinion =) tho they could try that someday but anyway, if you would have read my whole comment you would noticed that i said 'ok, to be serious...blabla...blaabla'
Perhaps it's time for you to take an english reading lesson or something, also i recommend taking english classes in general anyway, you have word orders mixed up in your comment...
oh yeah, i'm not trying to say that i'm particularly good in english, actually to be exact i got english teaching (which i would have attended...) only at elementary school... and i didn't go to those classes very much at last 3 years of elementary school.... phew, atleast they gave my graduation from there even when having one fifth of the minimum attended classes =)
Oh yeah, i wrote that at 'morning' and yes i had drank too much coffee in too short time, that you got right atleast =) and yes, i am paranoid sometimes...
"True knowledge is to know ones extent of ignorance." - Unknown
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Yes, you can need disk space for something other than MP3, DivX, and Porn.
The next version of Microsoft Office, for instance, will probably chew up at least half this much storage space.
What the hell!!! This is an article about a new larger hard drive coming out and you turn it into a rant about the DMCA. Get a life!!! If you want to rant about the DMCA do it to them directly and tell them about your dvd backup and stuff. They are the ones that care about it all not us.
> Out of curiosity, except for issues with dynamic range (which isn't far behind) what do you think film is better at? (In 35mm at any rate.)
1) ISO sensitivity
2) no sensor noise with film
3) chromatic abberations
4) colour reproduction (except for Foveon sensor)
5) true wide-angle lenses
6) resolution still not _quite_ there for poster-size prints if you're a super-picky pro. 10-12megapixels should do it, though, and that's probably gonna be available next year (rumoured Canon EOS-1Ds).
And that's just off the top of my head.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot - cost of camera. Canon's top of the line film camera (EOS-1v) is around $1600 mail-order. Their top of the line digital is the EOS-1D - around $5500 mail-order. It'd take awhile to recoup that cost over the film camera unless you're a pro going through a LOT of film. And by the time you did, your camera would be obsolete, and the EOS-1v film camera wouldn't.
*shrug*
Early 1980's, a CPA friend of mine had three or four machines on a network, and had a 20 MB (not GB) harddrive. When he told me about it at a fancy gathering at a Country Club, a hush came over the room. Combination of high cost to buy, massive storage capacity (for then) could have the impact of a whispered "PSSST, I just won a Million Dollars." Folks are all chattering, but believe me, can hear really good stuff, no matter how noisy the room at the time.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
That's tantamount to saying that large hard disks are circumvention devices under the DMCA. And it wouldn't be too hard for an overzealous prosecutor to make that tortuous argument.
If such suggestions (i.e., large hard disks only have illegal uses) are allowed to go unchallenged, pretty soon you won't be able to own digital storage of arbitrary capacity. I think the DMCA is quite relevent when it comes to large hard disks, espescially when one of the arguments for deCSS not being a piracy tool was that no one would be able to afford the storage for unencrypted movies -- an argument that loses force with each technical advance.
You could've hired me.
For fucks sake, learn how to write! It's painful trying to read your drivel.
As to the speed issue, Do a complete dump once a month, and incremental ones daily. That should help reduce the speed problems. Even so, you're right in that we'd probably need a faster network for this monster. 802.11g, perhaps?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yeah, I'm like that too:
I have no problem cheating with your wife and fucking your sister, either . . . I even wish you were dead so that it would be easier.
Can you imagine that... I need to back up my hard drive now :(
As sizes get larger and larger and the prices get cheaper I don't see how these companies can make a profit. How many people are really going to purchase a 320gig drive? I have 230gig now (120gig, 100gig, and 10gig) and I've still got almost 100 gig free, I just can't imagine how many 320 drives would really sell.
If I were them I'd just sit back for awhile and sell 200 gig drives, seems like it was only a month ago 200gig drives were announced here, and now it's up to 320.
Here's an idea for you Maxtor: don't announce you're new 500gig drive until the 320gig drive is on the market for at least a few months, ok?
p.s. 320gigs for $300-$400? Not bad considering drives half the size are selling for only $50 less on pricewatch.
So these disks are used TO create the backups. Hence all the refrences to stabily and such. I am pretty they would be used in a RAID type environment where if a drive did fail you wouldn't loose data. It looks like these drives are not fast enough to do repeated consistant access, hence they are tailored for write once read infrequently. This is NOT the kinda drive you would want for you desktop box.
FSVO backup that can leave you in the lurch. If you have, e.g., a fire, both drives will be toast and your data will be history. To have a meaningful backup you have to be able to ship the media somewhere else.
... Approx. 468 legitmate copies of the Harry Potter movie mentioned in the previous article.
:)
And have 80mb remaining for a bootable-viewer-os-type-thing.
Wow
... and then there were none