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Plasmon Exhibits Working Blue Laser DVD Drive
tedgyz writes "CDR-Info has an article describing the first working prototype of a blue-violet laser optical disk drive. The drive boasts 30GB of storage, dubbed Ultra Density Optical (UDO). The article has technical details and images of the drive and media." We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now. It's cool to see a product prepare for market that actually uses it.
30G? I think I shall have one.
We'll see this soon... does that mean before or after Duke Nukem Forever
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
This is only slightly relevant, as these aren't laser diodes, but but I noticed this AM standard long-wave UV LEDs have hit the electronics surplus market in big numbers lately for cheep (All Electronics has these at $1.75). All you experimenters out there can stock up now!
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now.
We can't stop with blue light! We need to branch out into purple, yellow, even magenta! Soon all the colours of the world will be under our umbrella, and we will be all powerful!
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
Is it me or it would take an awfull lot of time to fill in this drive?
At 4MB/sec and a total capacity of 30 gig, it would take 2 hours and 8 minutes to burn the media.
And half that time to read it all?!?
I'd rather be sailing...
It's vaporware.
..they have to torment me with 30Gb drives. As I work up to getting a DVD-R, now they're under £200 I've been thinking 'Ah great, smaller stacks of CDs, easier backups..' - and but with these it'd be even easier.
Great. Can't sit around forever I guess, though.
It'd be nicer if optical media had kept pace with hard drive storage. At least it's now starting to catch up - I spotted in the article that "Future generations of drives and media will increase the usable capacity of discs to 60GB and 120GB. Backward read capability will be maintained throughout the whole product roadmap."
120GB on a single disk? Optical media may be really useful once again - providing it's cheap enough, soon enough.
It supports the new UDO disks and it is developed for professional data storage markets, covering archiving, document imaging, call centers, email archiving, GIS, medical, telecom, banking, insurance, legal and government.
... and for the non-professional data storage of personal pictures, pr0n pictures, legal music, pirated music, movies, and pr0n videos.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
The laser's woman done him wrong...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I have always been wary about purchasing a so-called "red laser" DVD unit due to the historical ties that the color red has to Communism. Communism, as you are probably aware, resulted in hundreds of millions of death in the 20th Century. I could not, as a moral man, purchase a laser of this color. Who could sit down and watch Attack of the Clones without thoughts of the Soviet gulags distracting you?
Blue is the color of capitalism. It is also the color of patriotism and masculinity (as opposed to red, which is very close to the feminine color of pink.) It warms the heart to know that I can now watch my John Wayne collection on a moral device that is consistent with the ideals that I donned my country's uniform for in Grenada and Panama.
sustained write speed = 8MB/s. Then it would take more than 1 hour to fill the entire drive. That's like the old CDRom 1X!
take off every sig for great justice
I wonder how much blank media will cost. seing how when cd-r's used to be about $1 a disk and DVD-r's are currently around $4-5 a disk. I am guessing probly going to be around 15 a disk when this first comes out but at the current price of Harddrives thats a bargein. Of course when this hits the market Harddrives and other storage media will be alot cheaper.
All this low-level hardware tech is great, but how long before 2 or 3 camps form with different formats? It sure slowed down the adoption of writable DVD (I went with DVD+RW, myself). Bleh.
But in about ten years, they will combine this technology with that technology and dub it "Density Optical Hybrid" (DOH!).
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
The purpose in using blue instead of red is because blue has a shorter wavelength. Going further, the next step is in ultraviolet LEDs for shorter wavelengths and higher storeage densities.
(you heard it here first, get used to it)
sulli
RTFJ.
Try 10 years... I remember talking about these in 1993 as water cooler discussions as a sales rep for Egghead Software long before they became the Mayan Empire and made a complete transition to the Internet so they could sell volleyballs.
Laws are for people with no friends.
riiiigggghhhhttt.......
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
A single fingerprint probably covers several hundred megabytes. :)
Thank God they used cartridges in this thing! That solves a plethora of headaches.
Lets hope that the big software makers like Sony/Matsushita et al. decide to use cartridges when they release their (possibly blue laser) HD-DVD players next year (presumably).
Nothing is worse than having media skip from a mere fingerprint or a slight scratch- especially when you are watching a movie!
...UDO is its own standard of blue laser technology. The other great thing about Blu-Ray was that it was one standard: no DVD-R/RAM/-RW/+RW/ARGH! and now people come out with their own blue laser technologies? I want a 5.25 Blu-Ray drive that I can use to read Blu-Ray movies, make ISOs of them, backup my data, and not a billion standards.
*grumbles and walks off*
I'm one paranoid mother fucker... and I think you're out to get me! I will not post in favor of your coments for fear that the man will find me! THE MAN WILL FUND ME! And stop posting that anyways. It's been in like all the stories for the past day and no, it's never on topic.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
correction: big HARDWARE makes... DUH
We have ultra density. Will the next standard be called "extreme density"? And after that "unbelievable density"?
They are going to start running out of adjectives in a little while. Quick! Somebody start a adjectives standards body!
Definetly x-ray lasers. Yeah baby! Of course the CDs will have to be lead or gold foil...
I'm assuming the blank disks will cost more.
If there haven't been prototypes, how is Sony going to start selling them in a few weeks? What am I missing?
I've had 3 Seagate 18Gb Ultra SCSI drives die in the last 6 months.
I am very well aware of the rendundant coding used to provide for a certain amount of resliance of the data, both on CDs and DVDs, but at a certain point when the data density becomes this high, I would imagine that the media would lose data when you just touch it.
One thing that would put me at ease is a kind of media that is completely hermetically protected by a transparent plastic shell. Perhaps a stationary disk while the reader is the one to rotate. That way you wouldn't even need the hole for the rotating spindle.
OTOH, with 30 GB, I can imagine I could put my whole collection of classical CD music on 5 UDOs, uncompressed. Or they will think about some abherration such as AudioDVD, so that the whole 30 GB will be just enough for some 60 minutes of music....
Sigged!
Come with a black face plate?
That white color would look terrible in my "stealth" case
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Only $1/gig? Probably much more then that. And, these discs are in cartridges (which personally I think normal DVD's should have been like) so that will add a little cost too.
I'm betting at least $60 a disc when they first hit market.
Cool stuff though, and I'd love to have a re-writable version of this for a real backup solution without mucking around with DLT tapes like I do now. (at home)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
"Plasmon Exhibits Working Blue Laser DVD Drive"
This is not DVD. It's an optical disk drive, which uses much of the same technology as DVD, but is definitely not the same specification. You would not be able to read a blue-laser disc in any 100% DVD-compliant drive.
Optical discs that can hold more than CD's are not necessarily them DVD's.
-Amalcon
What would be cool if we could get these density DVD on an 8cm mini-DVD. That way it would be a nice solution for portable MP3 player/high denisity hard disk. Just a clue for any product people reading :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Mod this parent up! It makes a very important statement. While you're modding it up, see if you can move it to the Flash article.
Heh, sometimes it's worth it to surf at zero.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What about dataplay, 500MB in the size roughly of a quarter. Very neat, but i think they ended up filing for bankruptcy over competition with flash cards and hard drive based mp3 players. I think even Britney Spears was scheduled to release an album using this technology.
The article says that the disks are double sided. Does this mean that you have to flip them as with DVD's?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I still think RAID is the #1 way to protect data from hardware failure. Backups are never the newest data, and generally backups are only used to recover data from user error, data traansportation (copy a large database to tape, mail it to DR site), archival. Way way down on the list is recovery due to hardware failure, because RAID is such a perfect solution.
I worked at a data center with thousands of drives, some of them in a 30+ drive RAID set. In the five years I worked there, not once did we lose data due to drive failure.
For home, IDE/ATA RAID is becomming more and more of a reality. When serial ATA comes to saturation, I forsee lots more built-in hardware raid functionality due to easy cable management.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
For unintelligible statements in a story description like the one above, CowboyNeal should be sent to:
- KinderCare's Hooked on Phonics Class
- Jail -- Do Not Pass Go...
- Iraq -- To work as a translator for Baath
Also, as neet as you may find this "blue light" optical device, it's unique in that it is "Blue-Violet" not just blue. Prototypes of blue laser devices have been out for almost a year at least.I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
For those of us that have to do near-line storage, write-once archival (FTC guidelines for email retention, etc.), and other backup-ish stuff, this is a dream come true. Take that 10,000 disk DVD jukebox, swap the drives, and go from 40,000MB (about 3.5TB) to something nearly 10 times as dense (close to 28TB). God I can't wait for one of these. Toss in on your SAN, virtualize, and archive everything.
on newer DLT drives, this is amazing.
When having discrete, 30GB matters (for doing backups and archives and stuff), you almost always end up sacrificing speed to access said media. But this format is a vast improvement.
Of course, we won't now how much these systems will cost in the near future; just adding more tape drives in parallel could be more affordable!
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Sony already has a shipping blu-ray unit. Granted, it's only available in Japan, but thta's what your local neighborhood import shop is for... This is just a list of specs and pictures... Check out all those inputs!
Now, back in 1996-1997, 1.6 gig on removeable media (not counting tape) was pretty damn cool, especially since the largest hard drives were what, 10 gig?. I thought I was going to have 80 gigs of removable storage. But after I checked the price of the drives (1000+), the disks just stayed in the box.
So I can see these catching on in the corperate world for massive data backups, but probably not in the consumer market, IMHO. That is, unless, the drives are on the same pricing level as CD/DVD burners.
Like zip disks, floppies, and mini-disc. Hence, you protect it from grubby fingers.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
KMart has been using the blue light for YEARS, and look where it got them!
You might want to look into ATA RAID solutions. I just built an ATA RAID 5 solution for less than $2 per Gigabyte.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
What ever happened to FMD-ROM?
How about Penny-sized CDs
Or were these just another round of VC scams?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now. It's cool to see a product prepare for market that actually uses it.
Interesting that you say that... You see, for me, It's been cool to see a product prepare for market that actually uses it for seemingly years now.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
Anyone else here licking there chops at a chance to play with one of these.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
RAID still won't save you from user failure. Archives and backups are good :]
This media is just the right size for my needs. I just have one pressing question:
Will this new DVD drive turn all of my pr0n blue?
Why 5?...SCSI 5 is a minimum of 3 drives...of course you lose the space of one of them.
So when can I get my blue laser pen?
Please, everybody, buy these drives! Drive the price down so I can get it three years from now.
-ZOD-
Are we likely to see the initial (expensive) drives for sale a year from now?
This will really put the fear into Hollywood since it'll allow DVDs to be copied with ease.
This just makes me want to burst out singing.
KING:
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
ALL:
You are!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
KING:
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.
ALL:
It is!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
Not only does RAID's redundancy allow for faster read times (even on slower equipment) it's redundancy also is a kind of "backup"
:)
works well, Raid is pretty sweet
It even sounds tough. "Lets setup our RAID storage stuff" hah.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
I'm sure companies know about other wavelengths. The reason why they don't drop in an even smaller wavelength is that they will miss out on all the sales of this blue laser technology and secure their places so they can sell and market different optical technologies for hundreds of years down the line. The only time you will see the next technology coming out is when they have milked this one for all it's worth, Don't be fooled, there are plenty of technologies that work but are not yet shown to the public. There are false claims that there isn't a way to expand certain technologies, yet they come out at just the right time.
Ok, so you have an archive solution as well. A RAID will save you from hardware failure and will do that seamlessly. And Anyhoo, users don't usually notice "user failure" until months later after backups have expired anyway.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
When the Black Lite lasers finally come out we'll finally be able to store trillions of Elvis and sad dog pictures.
Seuss - I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
I would assume he is referencing having multiple "hot spares" esp since he mentioned having 3 drives fail recently. Even so, you only need one hot spare up at any given time to limit risk, and a RAID 51 solution will beat hot spares fairly effectively if reliability is your worst fear.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
RAID does nothing when you have complete disaster. I wonder (but don't know) if any of the WTC companies relied only on RAID and failed to do offsite backups.
I bet dollars to doughnuts that if they did, they are somewhere in Chapter 11 or worse right now.
It seems your theory also holds true in distant galaxies.
Red light saber = Evil
Here's something that bugs me about this industry. Whenever they come out with some new technology that blows away the previous iterations, they give it a name like that. Which is... silly, given the rapid rate of change in the field. Yeah, it's superlative now, but give it a few years and it'll be quaint.
Instead of naming this one Ultra Density and naming the next one Super Ultra Density, then Superfly Fantastico Jumbo Ultra Density, seems like it would be a better idea to plan for the future and call this one "Medium density"
Rhetoricians have the same problem. They keep naming new writing styles things like "Modern poetry," which means that the next one has to be "Post-Modern" which just sounds silly if you don't say it so frequently that it stops having any real meaning.
--AC
If you read what, because of the statement of first, is a dupe post. Was it Sony or one of the 'P' companies released their statement on this a few weeks back, which hit /.
That's what we thought, until our RAID controller died catastrophically. Immediate and complete data loss.
;)
RAID is nice; daily backups are better. Both together, plus a revision controlled and journalling file system is best
This is not good!
As you can see, we are still stuck with optical. In my opinion this is the worste imaginable idea!
CD's don't last that long because of scratching...and they can take a lot...DVD's are worse, with fingerprints rendiring them useless...imagine how bad this will be!
I have never considered optical as being a nice technology. I would honestly rather use magnetic disks like a hard disk platter or something similar...something that requires a very strong magnetic field to change the data (high coercivity like magstripes on industrial strength badges use).
The only thing I could see this used for would be a very low low usage application...like movies that you watch once every two or three months. I just hate the idea of having to be *more* carefull about touching the disk.
If *anything*, they should start covering the disks with a plastic container like minidiscs. This would fix everything wrong with optical media.
Like I put in a previouse comment
Hold on...let me clean the nanodust off.
Hey, sell a web-operated telerobot kit! That's be awesome to freak out my roommate's cat while at work. I'd buy one.
Well, when you lose the headquarters, 75% of upper management and 30% of your staff, I would guess that offsite backups of last weeks e-mail would be the least of your worries.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Am I the only one who noticed there's a new topic on slashdot: storage...
I'm not sure why this warrants it's own topic, but, hell, I guess it's okay. Things like this don't reall fall under 'science'
Recursive (adj.): see 'Recursive'
RAID is nice; Daily backups are too;
:)
so do both, and your data will stay new;
with Raid you get speed;
and with backups saftey, indeed,
So doing both works just fine,
Your data will be perfect 100% of the time.
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
When presenting poetry it is generally key to correctly spell safety Indeed your rhyming will be perfect frequently
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
All I want is a friggin shark with a blue laserbeam on its head.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Well, if you weren't an AC, Perhaps I would. Ah well. Your chance has passed. No further requests will be honoured.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Although I cannot spell safety;
I believe that formatting is good;
And I'd go back to correct it, if I could;
But even mispelled, it sounds pretty nifty
god, this is sad....
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
What is the purpose of a backup?
1) Enable recovery from user error. ie, a user deletes stuff they shouldn't have. A backup from last week can be used to retrieve it.
2) Recovery from catastrophic failure. eg. UPS failure, drive controller failure, or fire in the server room.
3) Recovery from a failed drive without downtime.
RAID solves neither of (3) but not (1) or (2). A backup solves (1) and (2) but not (3)
If you think about it, RAID is useful, but is certainly not a good backup strategy. In fact, it is not a backup strategy at all.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
There were many companies that lost 100% of their office but 0% of their staff. Those are the ones I am talking about.
Here is the thing . . . the R part of RAID stands for Redundant. Business continuity is only as secure as the weakest link. All the RAID technology in the world isn't worth squat if a 3AM office fire burns up all your servers. Of course, backups are no good if you don't have offsite storage for disaster situations.
In reality, a combination of all the technologies is the best practice:
-Server colocation for uptime redundancy
-RAID+1 systems for maximum hard drive tolerance
-Clustered servers for maximum server redundancy
-Offsite and onsite backups
-Backup generators
-multiple ISP's
This is all expensive but if your business lives or dies by your data, there is no question that ALL of these should be employed.
We've been hearing about the advantages of blue light for seemingly years now.
You can say that again! K-Mart rocks! I just can't resist those blue light specials.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
This is _NOT_ a troll, I would seriously like to know what the problem is in producing blue/violet or maybe even ultraviolet lasers. I know (vaguely) about the advantages of shorter wavelength of blue light compared to red, but nothing really in depth. Could someone enlighten me?
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Okay, I'm forgetful and I'm too lazy to google. I forget--what are the advantages of the blue laser?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Nowhere in the Plasmon information does it call this a DVD drive. In fact, the CDR-Info page specifically points out that this is NOT DVD.
It would be nice if the people releasing submissions would check the article titles for accuracy.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
There are already 4 standards out trying to become the next DVD standard. One format is to use standard DVD discs and MPEG-4. The other is to use Blu-Ray discs to deliver HD-DVD using less compression for a better image.
Most people of course are in support of the new Blu-Ray discs but just like Beta\VHS and DVD-A\SACD there are competing formats that may delay the technology.
Click here to support ONE HD-DVD FORMAT
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Considering that planes aren't going to fly into most workplaces, I think they are okay.
Plus, I said "way down on the list" because it's a damned rare occurance that total system failures occure. If it's a single machine, you should have some sort of backup machine sitting ready to go (cluster type thing) anyways, since a backup restore could be hours away.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
...how much data a beowulf cluster of these could store...
First off, most of the people in the WTC got out. Second, lets say that your corporate headquarters was hit by something else; like say, a Tornado, or a Huricane, or an Earthquake (nothing is retrofitted for earth quakes east of the mississippi; when that fault goes us east coasters are screwed).
OMFG! I even said in my post that RAID won't prevent your (1) or (2)!
My post was in reply to the guy that said "Well with this new medium as backup, I won't need the RAID!"
Does anyone ELSE want to remind me why RAID isn't a replacement for a backup, and completly miss the point?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I saw a working Blu-Ray prototype almost exactly one year ago at last year's NAB. OK, it's a different format, but it uses a blue laser, and has pretty much the same storage capacity.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
...because AOL Version 9 is going to be about 100Gb
As much as I need coasters in my house, I'd rather one AOL disc per version over 10 or so.
I KNEW it wasn't just a Japanese accent in the Pillows song "Razorlike Blue"...
This is all very fine and dandy, but it will be expensive as hell and almost useless to "the rest of us" if the cartridges aren't standard across the different manufacturers... we all know what happens to vendor-specific standards...
:)
Note: (unless it's a $40bil megalomaniacal company
On behalf of the Rainbow Coalition, I would like to congratulate the technical community on the acceptance of blue lasers in DVD technology. For generations, blue and other wavelengths of color have tried to break into the technological field, especially in rapidly advancing areas such as data storage, consumer video, and gaming consoles. This is a great step towards the full integration of blue wavelengths into the national and world economies.
Remember, it's not the length of your wave, it's the motion of your amplitude.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Ho Ho Ho.
(Now I have a Machine Gun.)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
www.blu-ray.com
I doubt all the drives were of poor quality or defective.
1. Check your power supply. If the 5V rail in particular is erratic or just too weak (say 10% too low) then that is likely the problem. Most people don't think about this, but it can kill most computer components.
2. Use S.M.A.R.T. capibility to determine the drive's temperature and see if it is getting too hot and needs cooling. This can also kill a drive.
And what happened to those Flourescent Multilayer Discs (FMD's) that supposedly had 7 or so layers on a disc on which to store data? I heard they had a potential to store 120Gb on each disk!
-- Fuck Beta
I run 4 drives and a spare. Running only 3 loses too much space. With 4 it's 25% rather than 33% on 3.
You might be exactly right.
All I've really wanted for a while is a distributed raid system. When working on things like source code and documentation, I couldn't care less about disk speed... 10kb/s is more than enough most of the time. So why not have some server that I can run on about five computers around the world that automatically does raid mirroring of my document directories? Even with the overhead of five reads / five writes per operation, speed should still be an easy 100kb/s over a fast internet connection, and you could recover from a nuclear war without much difficulty. The only downside is the inability to do offline work (or rather, offline work would not be backed up immediately), but that's what ubiquitous wireless is for.
I've had this sig for three days.
For what you speak of you could use one of the many, many applications out there to simply sync your local data store with a remote one.
rsync comes to mind. You could even schedule it to run every couple of minutes if you really needed to.
I think a WAN raid filesystem would be kinda flakey. I mean, it's pretty easy to lose connectivity temporarily over the Internet.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Comdisco did a study of the companies in the 93 WTC bombing that did not have a disaster recovery plan, 70% were out of business within a year.
And those sites were simply inaccessible for a period of time, not destroyed utterly, like they were in 2001.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Because I had to
Of course, it IS possible that the drives just died and you had bad luck. Stranger things have happened.
Heat can be a factor like the other guy said, but I have these two 10k 9GB SCSI drives in a linux box, along with three other drives in a mini-tower case with one fan, and they get so hot you can't touch them. They've been running for over three years now without a problem. =) Not saying you SHOULD have the drives poorly cooled... but it makes me wonder how hot a drive needs to be before it's too hot.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Try making a similar joke about fascism.
The Raven
And the Smurfs were Communists.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
However, I think the fans, in addition to the underpowered supply might have done the damage.
Consider that one reason for using the blue laser is the optical characteristics. Also note that Plasmon's unit has a 0.7 numerical aperature lens to focus the beam.
Makes me wonder. How much higher density could be achieved with a blue laser and a lens made from left-handed (neg refractive index) material?
Order of magnitude (300GB)?
Cantor Fitzgerald and subsidiaries eSpeed and TradeSpark, located on floors 101, 103, 104, and 105 of 1 WTC, lost 700 of 1000 employees, and were up and running again 44 hours later. Why? Live off-site backups of all data.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Right, but I don't want it to run every couple of minutes. I want it to run every time that a write occurs to the file system, and I want a read to occur from all sources every time I make a request, and at least get a consistent response for a majority before data is considered read. And yes, connectivity is flaky, but if you have five data sources, and one of them is the local host, you only need to be able to access two out of four remote sites to have workable data. How often do you lose more than half the 'net? Also keep in mind that I'm not proposing this be done for applications or anything which needs rapid access, just for small but valuable data files.
I've had this sig for three days.
What if you are the one with the internet connection problem? In that case you would only have access to one data source.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
No kidding. When the user accidentally removes or overwrites his/her 50-page document which is due to be presented before a board etc the next day... backups are much more useful than RAID.
RAID coupled with backups is the best way to go though... even with near-full backups the downtime associated with a crash can be annoying.