Slashdot Mirror
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."
Lots of flash and "Ignore the warranty behind the curtain..."
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'm not saying that SCSI is the solution for everyone, but it's been there and will continue to be there for the needs you mention.
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.
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...
Are you serious about censoring your own thoughts?
I have no trouble having thoughts about cheating on my wife (whom I love very much), fucking my sister or wishing someone dead fly through my mind. I just ignore them and refuse to dwell on them.
Being afraid of and/or trying to block "nasty thoughts" (or "sinful thoughts" if you're a religious person) just makes you dwell on the subject and is a certain way to neurosis or even worse mental problems.
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.
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
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.
Not spindle speed. You can put the newest fastest 15K RPM SCSI drive on an 15-year-old computer with a SCSI-1 bus. You probably need a SCA to 50-pin Centronics chain of adapters, and of course the drive will fall back to single-ended mode as opposed to low-voltage differential, but it works.
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.
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
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
No, but you can put 48 (or 480, or 4800) SCSI drives outside the PC-clone case. This isn't an option with IDE, where cable-length limitations hit you real fast.
I agree, no desktop user needs that many drives, and few server platforms truly need that many either. But it's available for those who do.
Again, I'm no SCSI bigot; all my personal systems are now ATA. But there is a very real market segment where ATA is not an option, either for RPM or drive number/cable length reasons.
I agree with this, but want it stated more clearly.
Pressed CDs can be better than magnetic for long-term. This excludes any kind of writeable CD format, like CD-R or CD-RW. If you want long-term storage for CD, pay to get a pressed CD on aluminum. Not a burned CD on organic dye. There are companies around that will do very small production runs for backup/archive for a not-too-unreasonable cost. (That "not-too-unreasonable" assumes your data is significantly important to you.)
It's worth it.
It's interesting seeing the difference between "offline storage", "backup" and "archive" stuff. It's mostly driven by how long the data has to last. Couple of months, couple of years, couple of decades, is basically how it goes.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Faster seeks! Reduce the rotational latency by spinning the platter faster and you'll have to wait less time for the data to come under the head.
If you do streaming video, seek times may not matter much to you. But for many applications which have large numbers of small files, seek times are usually the limiting factor. There's much more than just MB/s when it comes to disk performance.
But worse rotational latency. That's the point of high-RPM drives, after all.