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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?
Hopefully, linus will accept the patch to allow 64-bit file lengths and offsets in the vfs.
Yeah, I was actually quite content and never had any space problems on my home boxes using 9 and 18 GB drives. Then recently, I built a new machine, and just for the hell of it because they didn't cust much, I threw in for two 40G IDE drives for the new box - basically one for linux and one for windows.
Since I knew it was far more than I need, I've made a conscious effort to be a litterbug just to see how much I can take up. I never delete anything, never uninstalled unused apps - I've run an object code cach (ccache) on the linux side of the box for months now with an unlimited cache (compiling gcc, glibc, mozilla, etc)... I've just been messy all over, and installed tons of software - several multi-CD games under windows for sure, and just about everything under the sun in linux.
To date I haven't reached the halfway mark on either drive, months later. The linux one is at about 19G used, the windows one around 10.
11*43+456^2
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?)
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
Oh, you can also scan film at extended bit depth (not '16 bit colour' but '16 bit density' - they arent the same thing)... which generates huge files (compress nicely, tho.... but still).
Or you can drumscan chromes to get images that are around 120 meg to 250 megs.... and if you are particularily anal (no pun intended) you can scan up to 8000 lpi to print at 400 lpi...
So these files are 'active' in use, until they get archived. As you know most CDroms dont transfer all that fast (except the true 72x one that used what, 7 beams?) so moving them on/off media is a bit of a pain...
Anyways, Digital is fun, but I still love my AgX.
You're certainly on to something: One of my physics profs was a radioastronomer, and he needed a solution for storing gig's of pulsar data for extended periods of time, since radiotelescope time has to be reserved almost a year in advance, and you only get a week or so to take your readings.
Their solution: rigging 8 off the shelf VCR's in parallel to store their pulsar information. You can read more about it Here
From the PDF:
Developed originally for VLBI applications, the S2 recorder is based on the use of commercial VHS tape transports (VCR's), modified for use in digital high density, high data rate applications. A single S2 recorder "tape-set" of eight SVHS tapes provides up to 500 GBytes of data storage, and an unattended operating time of up to 8.5 hours at the maximum data rate of 128 Mbits/s or 16 MBytes/s, corresponding typically to 16 MHz bandwidth in two circular polarizations at 2-bit quantization, which generates a data rate of up to 1 GByte/minute.
--
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
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.
The good news is that if the hard drives keep dropping in $/Gig, then they will become their own backup media. You'll end up making periodic trips to the store to buy drives that will solely be used for backup, and you'll have a fireproof vault somewhere that just a few dozen hard drives. The only major problems are that they normally aren't suitably packaged for being used as removable media, they can't survive as much abuse, etc. Nowhere near as nice as a tape. But some of that is fixable by throwing money at it.
Imagine a $100 HD can store your whole file server's image, add maybe another $50-$100 for the cost of some case for the drive to live in, and perhaps provide an external interface for plugging it into the computer (firewire, serial ata, whatever). That'll be a $150 to $200 widget that will do the job. Compare that to the cost of high-end tapes.
The other direction the problem needs to be approached is data structures. We've got to store things in such a way that it can be backed up incrementally or restored to earlier snapshots. Many programmers already use revision control systems that can do this stuff, but they work with text files (source code).
Most general-purpose databases also handle a piece of this problem, since they have to be able to handle transactions that can either be applied, or rolled back. (But only for a limited time.) Perhaps some highend databases archive/log whole transactions; I don't know.
The techniques need to somehow get generalized. Then a $200 removable drive would be able to store many backups.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Backups are easy. Get two drives. Spend $100 bucks to get a firewire card and IDE-firewire external case.
One 320 GB drive in the computer. One in the external firewire case. Every few days, mirror from the internal to the external, and then put it back in the safe.
Really, it isn't rocket science. What's the problem?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
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