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LaCie Releases 500GB Add On Drives
Glewtion writes "LaCie has release their "Big Disk" - a large capacity FireWire case (400 / 500GB) with decent specs. The only thing they're not clear on is the fact that there are two drives in the case...but that only seems logical. Looks like it's only available in Europe though, so here's a link to a French Hardware site's description of it (translation courtesy of Google). Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection. Here's the LaCie page." What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly. Very Slick.
We have one of these babies in the labs right now for review. According to LaCiE they'll be released in Australia (and I would assume, althought I may be wrong) and Asia/Pacific soon - probably for Xmas.
Janie took my gun...
...Out of standard, considering each one of these storage units integrates two hard disks and a bridge FW/RAID, it is possible to configure them in RAID 1 (Mirroring) or RAID 0 (Stripping).
And the answer, dear asshat, is yes
"a whole 50 HOURS" of video.
According to the French site you can configure them to work in RAID-0 or 1 so I'd assume the computer would see them as one drive from the onboard RAID controller, otherwise a software controlled RAID wouldn't sustain 400 Mb/s, as they claim.
Beware the difference between megaBITS and megaBYTES. mb is megaBIT and MB is megaBYTE. One byte is eight times larger than one bit, so it turns out IEEE 1384 is slower by a factor of two than ATA/100.
Also remember that this is interface bandwidth we're talking about. One fast 50MB/s drive is all that's needed to swamp an IEEE 1384 interface, whereas even ATA/100 can handle two of those suckers on a channel (ignoring master/slave issues).
500GB = 4194304000Kbits
= 16384000 secs @ 256kbps
= 3792.6 72min albums @ 256kbps
= $20,000 worth of CDs, assuming you can find them at $5 each.
Not to mention the fact that that's half a year of music. So pretty cool for a radio station on a mission never to play a top 40 hit ever again maybe?
I would like to nominate "Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection" as the most fatuous comment on slashdot now that "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" is dead.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Well, if you wanted to use this for HD editing...
1920x1080 pixels
30 frames a second
16 bits per pixel*
That's be 949 Mbps, or 118 MB per second.
Or about 70 minutes of uncompressed editing on this at max resolution.
Of course, being FireWire, it'll have a lowly peak data rate of 400 Mbps. We'd need the 1394b 1600 Mbps standard for this to be useful for uncompressed HD editing. This is why honkin' Ultra-160 RAID systems are used for this kind of work!
The good thing is that over the air HD transmissions are a measly 19.2 Mbps. That'd give you 58 hours or so.
* (it's YUV with chroma sampled at 4:2:0, so there is one luma bitmap at 1920x1080, and two chroma bitmaps at 960x520, all at 8 bits per channel).
My video compression blog
LaCie France launches its new "Big Disk" hard drives which hold 500 MB and 400 MB and use firewire.
Firewire can theoretically deliver 400 Mbps, and these disks have a sustained transfer rate of 30 to 40 MB/s [Ed: note the unit change: 240 to 360 Mbps]. The casing is aluminum and ZANAC, an alloy believed to increase robustness and provide better heat dissipation.
The disks come in a 5 1/4 inch format and can be stacked on top of each other or installed vertically in a rigid base. [Ed: vibration causes disks to fail very quickly, best not keep this thing on your desk]. Since each unit comes standard with two internal hard disks and a FW RAID bridge, it's possible to configure them in RAID 1 (Mirroring) or RAID 0 (Stripping) [Ed: he meant "striping" - Freudian slip?]
And how much does this cost in France?
The LaCie Big Disk 400 MB (7200 rpm / 8 MB cache) costs 999 Euros HT (1195 Euros TTC). [Ed: HT = hors taxe, no tax, TTC = toutes taxes compris, all taxes included; dollar is roughly equivalent to Euro].
And the LaCie Big Disk 500 MB (5400 rpm / 2 MB cache) is available for 1124 Euros HT (1344 Euros TTC).
They come with a 2-year warranty and a CD with the Silverlining utility (Mac and Windows) and the Silverkeeper backup software (Macintosh).
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Comments talk about the new moderation system at the site and the site's resident trolls. Google translation does quite a job on the colloqial 'net language they use. A nice French pr0n banner at the bottom to even things out (vis-a-vis RAID 0 stripping).
Firewire certainly is up to snuff for video editing. With a 400MB/s bus speed, the limitation is with the drive itself. You need at least a 7200RPM drive to play back and edit standard def video in real time.
I have a 120GB 7200 RPM Western Digital firewire hard drive (Mac formatted) that I use for editing with Final Cut, and another WD 80GB 7200 RPM firewire drive (PC formatted) for Premiere and Avid use. They're very handy when you need to float between editing stations - just plug in the drive and pick up where you left off.
A 500 GB drive would be great (the 120 gigger is already half full), but you're right about this drive's specs - it just isn't fast enough.
OK so... Serial ATA debuts at 133MB/s AFAIK, while the current ATA/6 Spec is also 133MB/s. Firewire runs at 400Mb/s, or rather 50MB/s if we are to convert. So yes, is a tad slower. HOWEVER, ATA/66 is generally considered fast enough for modern drives, since the average drive bursts slower than that. In fact, in a comparison of the 4 fastest IDE drives available at storagereview.com the western digital 200MB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive managed to win out with a sustained transfer rate of 16.4MB/s. I'm not even going to mention that IDE has a maximum cable length (32 inches i believe) that precludes its use externally, and firewire does not. So you were saying?
Jeremy
I find it hard to believe anybody can identify 320 days worth of music they actually like.
Yeah, that's a lot of music. Over 7000 albums worth of music, in fact. I think that at the 500 gig point though, you're storing more than just mp3s. You're storing DivXes, ISOs, old email, etc. I built a 240G server a few months ago and I've been really surprised at how much space I've taken up on it just from being sloppy about what I keep around and what I don't.
Another thing to consider is that if you have 500G worth of storage you can actually store your music as wavs instead of putting up with mp3s, which is a nice thing if you are seriously backing up your CD collection.
I was curious about their claim that the drive can hold 2 days of uncompressed digital video since they didn't make any reference to the resolution or frame rate of the video they were talking about. I quickly found some figures here for storage rates for video. Based on their figures for NTSC video stored uncompressed in MJPEG format the video should run about 20MB/s not including the audio they factor in later. At this rate 500GB will only store 7 hours of uncompressed video, only 30% of what they claim. Now, I know companies like to tweak their statistics to make their products seem better, but this seems very misleading.
Dude, Firewire in its current incarnation is 400 megabits/sec, or roughly 50 megabytes/sec. I believe 1.2Gbps is coming.
Check out the comparitive review at barefeats in which they conclude that the WiebeTech product performs better than the competition.
Note that if you don't have firewire hardware on your box, you can get a PCI or Cardbus card to do it. There is a compatibility list at www.linux1394.org. I'm using one of the Belkin cards in my PC, and it works well.
Disclaimer, so you don't think I'm astroturfing: WiebeTech is my current consulting client.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
i should have mentioned that the BIOS is often the main limiting factor, not the OS.
ext2 is capable of 4TB maximum, with a max files size of 2TB. ext3 is the same, i belive.
ntfs has a theoretical max space limitation of 16 exabytes.
also note there are other limitations besides the theoretical limits... bios, interface, software, and max # of LUNs just to name a few. reliastically, a few terabytes is probably the ceiling for now for joe blow hardware.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
First generation 1.5 Gbps SATA is over 3 times faster than current 400 Mbps firewire, and 2nd gen 3.0 Gbps SATA will probably be out by the time the 1.6 Gbps firewire becomes a reality
The only reason SATA can be backwards compatible is because the protocol is so dang flexible- it can also do a lot more than just standard PATA features
SATA uses 250 mV signalling which makes it really easy to integrate it into ICs
The 1.5 Gbps for SATA is dedicated to each port, rather than the shared bandwidth of a firewire port (the 63 devices per port or whatever the limit is)
Native firewire storage devices are VERY hard to find, and non-native solutions are at the mercy of the firewire bridge chip on the device. The bandwidth that those chips can crank out is often as low as 12 MB/sec- nowhere near the 50 MB/sec potential of the bus or even an IDE drive.
Don't get me wrong- firewire is pretty cool and there are a lot of good uses for it, but I think that SATA is a much better solution for storage, and I don't think that blanket claims like yours are justified.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
mb is millibit - not very useful Mb is megabit MB is megabyte But see also kibi (Ki), mebi (Mi), gibi (Gi), tebi (Ti), pebi (Pi) and exbi (Ei).
MacMall has it on their website as available :) :) and bad old 50's-60's sci-fi B movies. One can never have enough video stored up for when the mpaa and the government make conditions where we can only watch the current drivel they put out -when- they say we can. I'll just turn off the tv and sell it watch the old stuff. I need a few of those 500 gig drives!
*soon* for $999 for the 500 gig one. Over the time I have been getting their web emails, since I got a 250 for my imac, and a 1/2 terabyte raid array down in the living room, their *soon* often seems to come to pass in a few weeks to a month at the very longest, so I expect these will be here for christmas giving.
Good thing I don't have a girlfriend right now to smack me on the back of the head, since I've got 750 gig almost filled with old digitized tv shows.
I've owned two LaCie pocketdrives for a little under a year (48gb and 30gb), and I must say that they've been a godsend for a geek like myself.
I can store all my stuff on them. Take them to virtually ANY PC in existance, (anything with usb or firewire - just about any OS works - linux, mac, windows... no drivers required), and "it just works".
The most practical application i've found for these drives is doing backups of my pcs or client's pcs before doing major upgrades, etc.
I can take my Mp3 collection anywhere. I once even configured one of them to be a BOOTABLE LINUX DRIVE which I could use ANYWHERE (on older pcs, i needed a bootdisk, but the idea was still cool...)
The only gripe with the 500gb drive is that it's too big to tote around like the pocketdrives, which fit into a pocket, run completely silent, have a shock absorbant silicone buffer, can be self-powered on firewire, etc.
Either way, all geeks can benefit from external usb/firewire drives. Before I got them, I never envisioned needing one, but now that I own two, I couldn't envision living without them.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
That would be nice if true... Unfortunately, the "B" in "MB" is LOWERCASE... i.e. It's 400 MegaBITS, not bytes... Meaning it's 1/8th that speed in MegaBYTES. That would make it 50MB... Although technically slightly slower than USB2.0, in real world tests, Firewire is FAR faster.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02q2/020426/
http://www.barefeats.com/fire18.html
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
My knee-jerk reaction to these products, especially from LaCie, has usually been, "wow, they're getting a nice premium for doing some integration". So, pricing them, I find the maxtor 250's are going for $400 a pop, add in a hundred bucks for a case/ATAFirewire bridge, and you've got only a hundred bucks left for doing your hardware striping. Probably with the right IC you could come in $50 under, but this is still a good deal.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)