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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.
they're not clear about the fact there are two drives in the case!
So is this disk as redundant as the editor's comments?
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...
annmariabell.com
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
... is that the editor apparently cannot spell apparent. And not only did he apparently misspell it once, he apparently misspelt it twice.
Christ... by my rough calculations, you could hold 8,000-10,000 full albums on that sucker, if we assume that you have about 14 tracks on an album, with each track being about 4 megs. That's an ungodly amount of music - sometimes these little "comments" people add to their stories just irritate me. They seem to exist solely for the wannabe geek factor... I can almost see the submitter thinking, "Hey, what additional comments can I add that will *impress* people? I'm a geek too, right?"
The French Translation Page says it has a 2 year warranty.. yet the Company page says 1..
Odd...
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Earlier today I bought a 80gb usb2 drive. :-)
I knew computers are obsolete as soon as you leave the store, but this is ridiculous.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
people pay?
Dumbass...
firewire is 400 mb/s.. ata 100 is 100 mb/s (hence the 100)
But one question. Though its been made terribly obvious to us that it's two drives, does it appear as two drives to your computer? If so, how does it manage that?
Begun, this browser war has.
...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
If only the TiVo had a Firewire interface....
Imagine getting 2 of these drives - 1TB on your TiVo.
Of course, I'd want a faster processor, or parsing the "Now Showing" list would take forever!
www.eFax.com are spammers
"What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly. Very Slick."
Me passed grade 4. Me can speel grate! Me want job!
Slashdot editors...continuing the assualt on all things grammatical!
Just in case you drop it in a lake or something, or the building burns down. Good idea!
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Most people don't have enough movies to fill two of these things. With a couple of these, a Dazzel Holywood DV converter, and a DVD burner, you could easily go into business converting Home videos to DVDs for people.
Whether you could make any money at it would depend upon what type of home videos they brought in, and what you got them to agree to let you do with the stuff...
-Rusty
You never know...
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.
...and since max sustained data rate from most hard drives is about 40MB/s, unless you are using raid it does not really make that much difference how fast your drive bus is.
"...and can pile up horizontally on other of the same peripherals models..." Hey! Get off my other of the same peripherals models!
"Sympathetic, the new system of comment, Ca will avoid the comment of twisted which spends their time insulting:p" Sounds like my voice recognition software is glitching up again. And many more.
This was a neat story, IMO:
("The Amazing $5k Terabyte Array")
That's not too long ago.
Now, for the same money, you can get twice the storage (4 of these), *and* a decent (though not high-end) laptop; you can fit your 2TB array and associated computer into a briefcase.
That's a lot.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Well, if not that, at least the whole red light district of it </sarcasm>
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
in addition to drives like this, Lacie intends to have a NAS storage head or unit in the future (http://www.lacie.com/technologies/technology.cfm? id=F8B7B736-7F7A-11D6-98090090278D3ED0). their AIT2 is also pretty nifty!
Actualy I have two drives tied together with windows spanning (220gigs), but I hope its a temporary solution. In the future I definetly plan on having at least some redundancy involved, probably the one where you take 3 drives and the 3rd stores the XOR of the other two.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
"What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly."
:)
I love the little comments after slashdot story submissions.
Yes, your 80gb drive is now obsolete. It is completely unusable with your current configuration. Throw it out now. Or for more eco-friendly processing, please mail it to:
;-)
Me
c/o Obsolete Hardware Dept.
NY,NY 10001
We will kindly take care of any obsolete hardware you may have around your house including sub 2GHz Athlons and P4s, 64MB GeForce cards, and low capacity hard drives of 100GB or less. Do not worry about our processing fee for it will be absorbed in the premium you pay for buying the fastest neatest doodad. Click here to receive notice when we launch our innovative program for disposing of your automobile once it loses that new car smell!
If you have a 500GB mp3 collection, the RIAA would like to have a word with you. ....and maybe, just maybe, it's time to get off kazaa. Seriously. Just doing some rough calculations, That's over 5,000 hours of standard quality MP3 audio. over 200 days!
It's been a long time.
500GB - how many Libraries of Congress is that?
You know, like computer peripherals that work with computers that currently exist.
And when was the last time you saw an external hot-swappable ATA plug?
Hey, tell you what. I've currently got a bridge under construction. I'll let you drive on it for the low monthly rate of $50 per month. Come on! Only $50 monthly for unlimited use of my yet-to-be-built bridge! That's a hell of a deal, friend.
If you don't like that, I've also got a $10 per month bridge just down the river. It's only two lanes, and it's sealed at both ends, but it's still a bargain.
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).
------
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).
satellite usenet
:)
shouldn't take THAT long to fill 500GB with a continuous full usenet feed at 128k or 256k. maybe a week or two. More realistically, cron a binary harvester against localhost, expire articles every few days, and stream mp3's through your stereo using MServ to vote up and down individual tracks. Now THAT's what I call "the sounds of the Internet"
Intelligent Life on Earth
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 would have thought it was two drives (since I haven't seen any drives larger than 250 GB), but I don't see how you can fit two drives in a 6.7x1.7x10.6" case. I have an external firewire drive and it's only about an inch smaller width and depth - not much extra room in the case either. And why is there only a 2 MB cache in the 500 GB version? Since every drive I've seen has at least 2 MB cache wouldn't a two drive RAID have at least 4 MB of cache?
The back of my head still hurts from her smacking me...
jk.
I think you were looking at seek times, my laptop drive gets better than 16 MB/sec. The WD 200JB gets almost 60 MB/sec transfer rate.
Here's a review page for the WD 200 GB drive and others.
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.
forget crappy mp3....
:-P
I think flac is cool but is too little, too late at this point. With 500 gig I don't need to compress at all, saving my time, and as my music collection grows it won't outstrip hard disk gains.
DVD iso's are a totally different story though
#6495ED - cornflower blue
I just got my external 120 GB firewire drive in the mail 2 or 3 days ago (figures they just released a new model... but it's not like i would have spent the money for the 400GB version). I must say, it works extremely well with my G4 powerbook. In fact, it't access speed when flipping between the directories is noticeably faster. They are fairly small too, i just tuck the drive behind my monitor.
All and all, i'm very pleased with it so far. I've transferred about 60+ of files too it, never even a hiccup in speed.
plus, it comes with all sort of diagnostics on the drive (preformatted in HFS+) format.
definitely worth the $270, especially for a powerbook limited by the size of the hard drive you can afford to put into it.
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
Nope, its just so Americans can understand how much it costs...
Tournament Management Online &
500 GB is about a fortieth of the Library of Congress, according to Wikipedia.
Compression would bring this down, and with good compression you could bring it down to maybe a 5th of the Library of Congress considering English has, according to Shannon's estimates, between 0.6 and 1.2 (probably closer to 1.2) bits of entropy per chararcter.
\begin{wishful thinking}
Just wait until holographic technology hits the mass market, then we can get it onto one CD-sized disk!
\end{wishful thinking}
\end{slashdot post}
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
I come to the comments looking for reactions to this new drive and I see people mostly making the same, overused, modded up six other times already joke. Mostly...
Oops.
(The apparantly unobvious thing about my sarcasm is that it's apparant to pretty much only the people who watch South Park. Apparantly...)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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.
actually, both windows and linux can theoretically support 2TB of data per server, possibly more by now. I have never tried THAT much on one server, but I do test 7TB disk arrays, and I am fairly certain the limit is still at 2TB for windows and linux. someone please correct me if i am wrong. i have never "tested" this fact, but thre is documentation of it if you are willing to look.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
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?
It appears you are right about the 60MB/sec transfer rates, but the number I quoted was 3 pages past yours and was called "legacy transfer rates". I'm not really sure what this entails though - cacheless transfers? The numbers you presented do seem more relevant. Either way its below half of what ATA/133 is capable of, and 60MB/sec is exactly what USB2.0 does theoretically.
Jeremy
~13GB per hour. At which rate you'll be able to get less than 40 hours on to one of these drives. Or less than the amount of video a film student can shoot in a semester.
Smoking the herb tonight? THe drive you linked to transfers at 56 MB/s per second. The Maxtor drives used in LaCie's housing transfer at 60 MB/s. In a striped raid array, those disks would push 90 MB/s sustained transfer.
Buy the bare drives if you need the space. The houseing, along with firewire's limited performance, will gate the performance of these drives which otherwise could almost double the performance of the Lacie unit, at a significant discount in cost.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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
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)
I have a similar enclosure to this made by Miglia (Mediabank). You can basically put 2 3.5" hard drives in there as master/slave and connect up the firewire cable.
It's neat but doesn't work under linux. The ieee1394 stack in Linux doesn't support multiple LUNs for a device, and so it can only see the first disk in the box. I highly suspect that the Lacie drive will be the same. It's probably just using an updated version of the Oxford chipset that can cope with drives over 120Gb. From the ieee1394-devel mailing list, there's been no serious action to work on this.
Firewire drives are well cool though.
Jamie
Imagine one of these hooked up to a beowulf cluster! ;-)
11600 albums ~= 1.6 albums/day since CDs were introduced in 1982
~= 90m of shelf space
Again, the logistics are impressive, as is your voracious appetite for new music.
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"
Big Deal. Maxtor sells external 250GB Firewire/USB2 drives. The cool thing is that they come with backup software and a button on the case.
Push the button, make a backup.
I've been looking at this as a backup solution, I just need to get a firewire or a USB2 card.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
{begin parochialism}I find it hard to believe anybody can identify 320 days worth of music they actually like.{end parochialism}
.shm or something simlar, and those run about 5 times the size of the equivalent mp3. Lastly, the true audio file/snob will leave his/her music as .wav. For me, that would immediately move my collection over the 100 gig mark. And who says this is just about mp3? This drive would only hold 100 DVDs. If you wanted to capture in HDTV format, it would hold even less.
It's pretty easy - just leave pop music behind and explore "serious" music (eg. classical or jazz).
First, you really can tell the difference betwee 128 and 192, particularly in the bass when the full dynamic rage is blasting (think a Beethoven finale). Also, some high end voice loses some clarity (think Ella Fitzgerald). So that increases storage needs 50% right there. Next, the typical pop CD contains a bit over 1/2 an hour of music, while classical CD's often run to 70 minutes or more. Lastly, with serious music, it's not just the piece, but the performance. The same composition with a different performer can be a completely different experience. You can hear this easily with Chopin and operas, but it is also true of any symphonic work worth hearing. Talking about jazz without referencing the performer (and the performance for the really good stuff) is a complete waste of time. "remixes" are as old as music performance itself. So if you like a piece, you will have multiple, high-quality copies. I personally have three copies each of Shostakovich's 8th string quartet and Beethoven's symphonies.
If you are into live performances, then you're using
Never underestimate the human need to fill all available disk space.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
60MB/sec is exactly what USB2.0 does theoretically.
Yeah, but in the real world Firewire is faster than USB2.0.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Finding them isn't the issue, you can find 18" ATA cables if you look. The problem is using them, their just too damned short! They're barely usable for one drive, and for two drives you'd need a custom (very cramped) case. That's why you don't see them at your local computer store; nobody wants them!
If you really want a drive cable that's hard to find, though, try finding a laptop IDE cable (44-pin) that's 18", or even longer than 6" for that matter.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If I had to set up a server today, using plain 'ol parallel IDE drives on a plain 'ol IDE port, I'd stick Serial ATA adapters on everything and dump the parallel cables entirely.