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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
Dumbass...
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
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...
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).
"...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
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!
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).
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
The back of my head still hurts from her smacking me...
jk.
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.
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!
Last I saw, the LOC was 13 TeraBYtes. You'd need 26 of these drives. Alternatively, Each drive holds ~4% of a LOC. Yes, I understand your question was kind of a joke, but I thought I'd do the math real quick just to consider the implications. I wonder if anyone has a good estimate of how long it will be until the typical consumer PC has sufficient storage space to hold the LOC?
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
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?
It's not "how long until the typical PC can store the LOC?", it's "how long ago's LOC can the typical PC store?"
How big was the LoC 5 years ago? Under a few hundred gig, I'll bet. Today's LoC is (or so I read on Slashdot so it must be true) about 13TB. So how long will it take for desktops to reath 13T? Well, at their current ~40%/yr increase, about 13-14 years. At which point the LoC will undoubtedly have swollen to about another 13-14 years worth of PC evolution. But I don't think *anyone* thinks hard drives will continue to scale for almost 15 years. The superparamagnetic effect has been looming for the past 5 years or so and lord knows how much money has managed to push it off a few more years, but we're rapidly approaching the point where the amount of energy difference between a N and a S magnetic domain is the same as the amount of thermal energy present - presto, a random collection of bits.
Maybe materials science will surprise us once again. The road started with MR (magnetoresistive), then GMR (giant magnetoresistive) and something else whose TLA I can't remember. Then Pixie Dust, and now Pixie Dust2 (5 layers rather than 3) pushing 80Gb/sq. in (if memory serves). A 3-platter design using 3.5" platters with a 1" hole for the servo could pack just over 500GB in. Now figure buying them for $200 - suddenly ripping your DVDs to disc doesn't seem quite so stupid. My mind rebels at the thought of 5T of RAID5 storage in a 3U rack, with 2 hot-spares. I also cringe at the thought of formatting that. Or fscking.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
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)