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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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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, 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.