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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?
Now I'll have 20k of useful e-mails, but a trash folder with 319Gb of spam.
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.
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
Probably within two years based on release schedules. About a year ago the biggest drive you could buy was ~100 GB. Now we're talking about 320 GB drives in a few months. And both IBM and Seagate have demonstrated higher yet storage densities in the lab, so they'll filter down in the next year or so.
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.
aw shit, i just posted on /. -- i guess you're right, it does make you do bad things :(
He's thinking of RA1D - redundant array of 1 disk:-D
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
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.
More games? Surely there is something better to put on ones hard drive than porn.
Yeah, install GTA3 and expansion packs, download all the Q3/HL/UT/SoF/RtCW/etc packs and maps you can find, etc.
After all, violence is far better for you than sex. Talk about screwed up values. Yes, most porn may have little to do with love, but demonizing sexuality is a bit of puritanical history that the world could do without.
Oh, and for the record, I do play FPS's. Stopped downloading porn a few years ago, not because I found it despicable, or because I don't like the female form (my wife will vouch for the fact that I do), but simply because I'd had "enough" and it wasn't as titillating as it was as a teenager.
Hope the troll is full now.
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...
Amen.
Since I got my cable modem, I've been routinely going through about 50 CDR's every month or two -- These are mostly anime fansubs downloaded from alt.binaries.anime and alt.binaries.multimedia anime, each of which can range from 90mb to 400mb (on the high-end). Some of the fansubs you can find are higher quality than anything that's currently being offered on VHS or DVD.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Do owners of Maxtor hard drives agree with the accuracy of this figure? How did they calculate this?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
They may have tested a thousand units over a thousand hours, which is about 42 days.
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?)
Mp3's!!
:(
320GB is a nice jump. Unfortunately, the initial price is way too expensive. It seems like every time hard drives get to an affordable level, my collection of mp3's shoots past it. At the moment it's at 700GB, and they are all archived on 1100 cd-r's
At the moment, I'd say the best deal is 80GB hard drives at about $80. But a hobbyist can't afford 10 of those.
Another phenomenon I've noticed is that the more you have on a hard drive, the faster you can set up trades. Which just makes your collection grow even faster. Even if I had all 700 GB of mp3's on hard drives, it just means I would be able to double the collection in a month or two. Enough hard drive space is thus impossible to attain.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
No, they aren't. MTTF is Mean Time To Failure, where "mean" means "average", get it? Having a drive that, theoretically, lasts a hundred years is meaningless from an engineering point of view. Reliability figures such as that are used to calculate how much redundancy one needs to make sure the system as a whole will not fail, within a given margin.
Yeah, that's right, I can keep a useful history over weeks or months with 320 Gb hard drives littering the place...
Fer chrissakes: mirroring is NOT backing up. $300 to $400 for a drive is not the same as $35 per 60 Gb tape.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
320gigs of storage is over kill.
One word: VIDEO
An array of these would be nice.
Well, if you read the article, these drives are aimed at the 'near line storage' space. The 320 gig version is only 5400RPM, and the 240g is 7200 rpm.
For your aplications that need speed, you don't want these devies. You want 'solid state' hard drives (aka gobs of RAM on an IDE/SCSI bus).
Besides, while I havn't run the numbers, I'd be willing to bet that a single 15k RPM drive can't fully utilize an ATA133 bus. (it may be able to burst that high, but I doubt it can sustain that rate in the real world.)
That's why scsi systems that are at 320 megaBYTES/sec usually have 14 devices on them.
Zapman
I agree! Get rid of all of that filth. Send it all to me - I selflessly volunteer to take care of this terrible problem!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Sure, just get a Fast Trak board. It will do Raid 1 and 5.
:)
Oh and you will need at least 2 drives
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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
No, that's the Rated Life, which is a completely different spec that rarely makes an appearance in advertising. Which is a shame, because MTBF statistics are useless without knowing the rated life statistic.
A MTBF of one million hours means that if you have (for example) 1000 drives, and replace ALL of them at the end of their rated life, you will experience a failure every 1000 hours (every 6 weeks).
Oh, and anyone who maintains a farm of machines with 1000 of these drives will find out just how fake those specs are.
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
I can only assume this is a troll. You do understand that at 128kb/s that many mp3's would take you approximately 486 days to hear in their entirety. Hell, it would take 55 hours to burn that many CD's assuming you have a fast drive and are quick with the switches.
You are either a very sick individual or you're pulling my leg. Get help.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
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.
That's right; porn leads to masturbation, and masturbation kills. I know because there was a string of brutal masturbatings across the west coast last week. Look at the evidence!
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)
Anyone else notice the corollary to Moore's law: as storage capacity doubles, the quality of what's stored will be reduced by 1/4? A haiku can express multilayered, meaningful thoughts that translate across languages and cultures in about 85 bytes. It took 4 gigabytes to create a pièce de résistance of diaper changing, some unintelligible babble, and drool. I can only imagine what the future has in store for us.
;)
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
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.
>Mac OS X, BSD, even windows 2000 have all allowed
>64-bit file lengths/offsets for years, but linux
>still uses a 32-bit offset. Extfs is hardwired to
>only allow 32-bit file lengths, but jfs, xfs,
>reiserfs, etc. aren't so limited.
>
>Hopefully, linus will accept the patch
>[kernel.org] to allow 64-bit file lengths and
>offsets in the vfs.
There has been 64-bit file support in the vfs and ext2 since 2.4.0.
Matt
Additional spindle speed? Why?
If you double the data density of a hard disk, you have increased it's read speed because much more data passes under the head per revolution.
Personally I would much rather see higher densitty drives than just faster ones. A higher density drive is both faster and bigger. A higher speed drive is just faster.
As for space, I would like to be able to rip all of my DVD's to hard disk and access them via a small dedicated appliance. Trying to do that with SCSI would be not be cost-effective. Besides the initial hardware cost, the power required to run a huge chain of drives is significant. The more data we can fit onto a single drive, the less power we need to use per MB of data. That makes me happy.
-sirket
>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 do, but I remember the specs a bit better than you. Bigfoot drives were only avaialble at 3600 and 4000 RPM.
A large number of consumer level IDE drives are still 5400 RPM, and a year ago it was probably the majority of them.
Matt
At the moment, I'd say the best deal is 80GB hard drives at about $80. But a hobbyist can't afford 10 of those.
:)
I don't think a hobbyist could afford an external drive enclosure for 10 drives either. As a matter of fact, I don't think it's quite "hobbyist" by the time you're up to 700 gigs
BTW, how many of those albums do you own? I have a friend who has close to 1000 CDs, and if we ripped them and only got 2:1 compression (you can get this with Shorten compression and it's lossless), that would be less than 500 gigs. Yeah, this may have passed from hobby to obsession.
Just a hobby since 1998. (I am a collector, so collecting full album-mp3's was a logical niche) There are people who collect weirder things.
It probably took more than 55 hours, since I used to have a 2X burner back in '98.
The collection is currently at 11,600 full albums. However, there are people I know that have much, much more. There are a couple in the US that I know that have about 18,000 albums. But the ones I know about that have the biggest collections are all from Europe, with more than 30,000 albums. Managing that kind of collection can really get out of hand. You have to deal with duplicates, quality control becomes harder, so you end up with some albums missing songs, or Xing-encoded songs sneak into the collection.
Using excel lists to keep track of artists is the preferred method... So I bet they're glad the newest version of excel now can handle 65,536 rows. If anyone wants to see the excel list I use, feel free to send email address to "r a d e r 1 9 7 3 [at] yahoo . com"
It is 1/2 a meg, though, zipped up.
Some people are switching to DVD-R burners, which will help on number of discs. (My 1100 CDR's would fit onto 150 DVDR's for instance) But it'll be a time consuming task, not to mention slightly costly: $287 for burner + $150 for discs.
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
"the n's justifys the means'.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
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
I have thought about this before, and was curious-- would it have to be an external drive enclosure?
The case i have now is a full tower, and quite tall. I built it quite a while ago, so can't remember the exact number of bays available. but it's something like 8. Assuming that cable length wasn't a problem, couldn't a person just buy a few PCI ATA cards, and hook up all 8+ hard drives in one box?
A person could also set up external firewire kits, although those seem to run almost $50 a kit. (although I would hope cheaper ones could be found)
I am familiar with Shorten. I know a guy who uses FLAC, and has built scripts to encode them on the fly to mp3 for automatic streaming purposes. But besides that, I haven't dealt with them. I think that burning one or (mayyybe) 2 lossless albums on one cd-r isn't very appealing to some people, however, this should turn around when DVD-R's become more popular and 7-10 can fit on one. (Much like mp3 albums on CD-R now)
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.
No offense but are you fucking crazy? Did you happen to notice the COST of those drives??? Jesus Christ! $1800 for a 180 gigabyte drive???
You really should try comparing apples to apples.
-sirket
You had platters? We just had a pile of magnets scattered about on the desk. We had to build a write head out of a 9V battery and some wire and write each bit manually.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
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.
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.
I have thought about this before, and was curious-- would it have to be an external drive enclosure?
/
http://www.twinipc.com/product/4U+Chassis/RMC4D
Holds 18 drives (16 front mounted hot swap + 2 internal) I put 160GB drives in them for 2.8TB of storage per server but with 320GB drives, that could be 5.7TB. MMMMmmmm.....
'course, you lose some of that to RAID overhead, and Linux won't make a filesystem larger than 2TB anyway so I have a few hot spares...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Does this mean you don't like me anymore?
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Yeah, guess I was a little rough on you. There are a lot weirder people out there. I still don't fully understand having music you'll never actually hear. Most hobbies involve collecting visual items so the collector can at least make the argument s/he has observed all of the items in his/her collection. For all you know, the Garth Brooks song you haven't gotten around to is actually 3 minutes of Jar-Jar Binks professing his love of Jedi.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
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.
> 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*
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.
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?)
Harsh? Hardly. If I was embarressed about it, I would have posted anonymously. Besides this is slashdot--at least you responded.
--I still don't fully understand having music you'll never actually hear
As a trader, you accept things you don't really want just incase another trader wants it. I remember finding a trader who actually had some Legendary Pink Dots I wanted. (LPD is kind of rare). I was refused a trade because they were only interested in Prog-Rock, and I had none. I went to the public library and ripped a box set of Pere Ubu, and was in like flin.
As a collector, having a full collection is always the goal. Did you collect baseball cards? Did you actually look at each card? Or was getting the whole 1983 set more important?
Most hobbies involve collecting visual items so the collector
Funny thing to say about Audio. But I know where you're coming from. I actually work with other trader's lists in excel all the time, so viewing my collection in excel IS visual.
However, the best answer I think I can give to a non-collector is this:
A few years ago we used to have friends over on weekends and we'd play this game while drinking... They would mention a song they liked, but hadn't heard forever. We would then see how fast I could look it up on Napster and download it, then play it. Back when Napster was new, this was a great novelty. Now imagine doing the same, but straight from a collection on a 5TB hard drive. Instantly accessable, maybe even linked to a database that indexes it by year or genre or mood types. It's kind of like having a library in your pocket.