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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."
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.
Anyway, RAID is not backup. If you have two of these monsters, you could put them in different machines in different rooms, or even at a different site, and that would protect against things like big rocks falling on your computer, where RAID wouldn't.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
We got a tape solution recently to back up our TB array. It cost over US$15K. Apparently it can do 200GB compressed per tape per hour.
Tapes are old, old, unreliable, shitty technology. Just buy two drives. Another hard drive is a faster, more reliable backup.
You can still back up your critical stuff on CD's. I've never known anyone to have more than a full CD full of truly critical stuff (at home). Hell, soon with DVD's, that's what, 17 GB??
Video editing would chew up 320 GB pretty fast... and that's not even HD.
Being able to store CD's in a lossless electronic format (like FLAC) would also chew up space moderately fast, although you could fit one hell of a storage library on that.
For business use more space is always good. Databases chew up space like nothing else, particularly when you're talking about data warehouses.
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.
10^9 is Giga (G)
10^12 is Tera (T)
10^15 is Peta (P)
10^18 is Exa (E)
10^21 is Zetta (Z)
10^24 is Yotta (Y)
Get your SI prefixes here
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
>What happens when you have a fire, tornado, flood
>at your server farm? Your precious raid array is
>now paperweights.
Or more likely when someone accidently deletes something they shouldn't off the fileserver, or from their mailbox.
>What backups do you restore on the new system to
>minimize down time?
>
>Until a viable backup methodology is developed,
>businesses will rightly view these super large >drives as a liability, not an asset.
DLT7000 (30GB/tape)?
VXA-1 (33GB/tape)?
AIT-2 (50GB/tape)?
M2 (60GB/tape)?
VXA-2 (80GB/tape)?
Ultrium (100GB/tape)?
SDL320 (160GB/tape)?
Ultrium 2 (200GB/tape)?
Note that those are all *native* capacities. You could theoretically back up one of these high capacity drives to a single tape, depending on the data you're storing.
A library would be a much better option, but even that isn't necessarily beyond the reach of even small businesses. A VXA AutoPAK 1x7 with a native capacity of 560GB is only $3,299 from Exabyte.
The problem with backup is largely one of what *home* users can do.
Matt
1. games -- with modern PC games requiring from 500 megs to 5 gigabytes for a 'full' install 320 gigs will fit you approximately 200 games.
2. DVDs -- DivX is for sharing online, real men don't recompress lossily compressed formats (like MPEG-2 the DVDs come in) at about 7 GB average per movie you could fit about 45 movies on that drive. Even if you went with DivX though, you'd need an average of 1 GB per movie, so you're only up to about 320 movies.
3. porn -- the oldest obsession, there can never be enough storage for these movies/pictures/etc..
4. ogg/mp3/whatever -- 320 GB is a lot of music, but translates to 3000 to 6000 albums depending on the bitrate used. Losseless compression would fit fewer still, and some people would seriously rather not use a lossy compression method.
5. Archive usenet binary groups -- at 320 GB you can only pick a few groups though, otherwise you'd be changing drives pretty often...
6. put steven speilburg to shame -- with today's computers there is no reason why you can't produce the next jaws on your home PC, assuming you have the creative talents, and the 320 GB hd to fit all the video in losslessly compressed formats.
7. Create a Linux distro ISO archive. -- With distrowatch.com ranking 91 versions of linux you'll fill that 320GB pretty fast trying to archive all these little linux OSes for posterity.
8. calcualte pi to the 320,000,000,000 th digit, and store it on your HD. At one byte per digit in uncompressed format that's how many characters a 320 GB HD can hold (because of the HD industry standard of using units of 1,000 instead of 1024)
9. store approximately 160 years worth of warcraft 3 replay files.
10. Provide everyone in the world with ~ 50 bytes of 'free' storage, or provide everyone in america with 1,111 bytes. 320 GB doesn't go far, does it?
Ten good reasons, maybe not all convincing to you, but all valid uses of a 320 GB hd.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The researchers do data manipulation, meaning that most of these files will change over the course of one month. Moreover, a lot of them want to be able to go "damn, I've done this blah-blah transform on my image data, and it screwed it up. Can you restore this directory the way it was two months ago?
That's the reason they want it to go back 3 years, with monthly snapshots. The dailies have the latest up-to-one-day snapshot of the data. In case one of the physicists removes a file and wants it back a week later, we can restore any part of the system entirely from the dailies, since we store archivals off-site and checking them out and back in just to restore one file is an incredible hassle.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Many contracts REQUIRE that a backup be held offsite. The company I work for is required by our investors to keep a full backup of our software offsite just in case the building burns down. It's getting harder and harder to do this as the system grows. Luckily we aren't approaching the 1tb level, heck, I don't think we've even hit 100gb yet. But we're also very much behind the curve on our storage technology, so the 70gb or so of data that I DO have to backup becomes quite the pain in the ass sometimes. Especially since Dump sucks...
And since I'm asking, does anyone know of a good software solution for backing up a database without stopping it?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji