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."

Comments

Geezzzz...

[mr.nicholas]

How many years ago did 1TB of personal, home-based storage seem impossible?

Now the big question is: how do I back this up?

I agree, we do need space

[FreeUser]

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.

Re:Legit Uses...

[purduephotog]

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.

Backup Costs

[ansible]

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.

Re:Lots to lose

[Azog]

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?