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A Terabyte In A Cigar Box
Anonymous Howard writes "LaCie has introduced a 1 Terabyte (capacity) disk for (get this) only $1,199.00!(USD) It is external and equipped with FireWire 800, FireWire 400, iLink/DV, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 to connect to both PC and Mac. Take a look here."
Cuban hard drives are illegal to import in the United States.
Max sustained transfer rate :
FireWire 800: up to 55MB/s
FireWire 400: up to 35MB/s
USB 2.0: up to 34MB/s
OK, is backup/archive solution, but 5 to 8 hours to transfer all disk, how do you back this up? :-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wow, FireWire 400, 800 *AND* iLink / DV ? How did they do THAT?
And, it not only does USB 2 but 1.1 as well? That's amazing!
Now, does it have a Philips-head screwdriver, too?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
in other words, stor more pr0n than you could ever possibly view.
four 250GB hard disk drives and a controller in a case for $1200... What will they think of next?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A cigar box full of porn!
It's a 1TB array in a box (just look at the dimensions and weight if ya doubt it)... Not that it really matters - heck it's way cool..
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
I know this is "just the way" drives are measured, but all those missing 24 bytes are really starting to add up. --H
introduced a 1 Terabyte (capacity) disk
:-/
Terabyte??
Ohhh... capacity! Whew - I thought terabyte was a colour or something!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1) Last Lacie drive I bought was the flakiest thing ever. Not the drive so much as the enclosure. Removing the drive from it and just installing it internally it worked fine.
2) Wouldn't you be able to do the same with this?
I do not have a signature
1 Terabyte (capacity) disk for (get this) only $1,199.00!(USD)
Now is that a real terabyte or just 1 trillion bytes?
Also $1.20 / GB isn't much of a steal. I never spend more than $0.50 / GB (after rebate). External, blah blah blah...
That's not bad, considering an external drive that's 4 times the size of $200 internal drives.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Just imagine... a complete terabyte of data destroyed with one head crash...
No Linux driver ...
Computational Chemistry products and services.
What's that? It's not? Oh well then. Back to downloading porn.
Wow. I calculate it would take about 10 continous days to download or upload one of these over USB 1.1.
...
The primary subtitle is "Bigger Disk", which is suspiciously similar to the subject lines of half of the spam I get.
Are there any internal drives with this kind of capacity? External's nice, but easier to lose than something that's actually shut inside your computer's case.
Surely you mean 5 LoCs in a cigar box? ...
that'd be about 500 deciLoCs per cigar I reckon
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
2 Gig of Cubans, and I'll try one of those custom hand-rolled jobs you got there. Yeah, the one with the pointy ends.
You are not the customer.
We really are about to hit the terabyte age, aren't we? I remember when 100 megs was cool.. then the gig.. then 10 gigs... then 100...
Sorry, nothing terribly insightful to say here. Just amazed at how far storage has come. This particular device would have been interesting for Weta to have during production of RotK. They used many many terabytes of data. They'd probably have been quite happy to hand carry a terabyte of data. (Faster than a gigabit network in many ways...)
"Derp de derp."
You do know that it's only a cartoon, right?
I think Monika Lewinski would like this
How would you go about RAIDing these things?
I would wonder about heat and noise, myself. But otherwise, seems like a nice solution. I like going external on stuff like this. Nifty!
11 pounds, though. Ouch. Talk about a brick.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
[insert unwitty and unoriginal sex joke here]
I can store the porn of 10 regular men!
- Sherman
That drive will only hold 1/20th of the Library of Congress.
Buy 19 more if you want to be cool.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
from article:
LaCie Bigger Disk allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music and up to one month of non-stop MPEG-2 video
I can't wait to see the COPS episode where guys in RIAA jackets chase down some thug carrying one of these HD's.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Now I can hide 1 terabyte of porn on a hard drive that fits in the cigar box I used to hide my analog porn in!
w00t
Lacie says the drive runs at 7200 RPM. Anyone know what's inside the case and what hardware glue they're using to connect them?
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Your disk bigger than a club!
Is this some sort of RAID setup? And if so, does it boast better read/write than single external drives? And if so, what kind of powers does it have? Does it use its powers for good, or for awesome?
I want some of those beefy drives they've got in there for my own RAIDing...
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
But it doesn't mean we should continue to make
files bigger and bigger.
If anything, we should compress everything, and
have even more space. There's no reason to fill
a 1TB drive as quickly as it can be these days.
Compress, Compress, Compress.
How long until a 1TB iPod?
My fear would be that the proprietary controller would go bad and then you would lose all the data you had stored. I bought a sancube that was a raid array in a box and lost data when it went down. They repaired it but that took two weeks. Those were two weeks I didn't have. When I got it back I removed any data that was still useful removed the drives and threw away the box. I just couldnt risk any more problems.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
* 1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
In fact, 1 TB = 1024 bytes ^ 4 = 1099511627776 bytes. So you're being shortchanged by over 10%.
sulli
RTFJ.
Ofcourse you could by 4 seperate usb2/fw enclosures and 4 250MB drives for sell, but i guess it would look nice in a rack. ... does it have some kind of redundancy ? Otherwise the combined risk-factor could be on the high side for such an application.
However
Yeah but how many cigars can you get in it eh, tell me that.
Of course, for a grand and some change, this thing better make the bed the next morning, you follow...
I didn't see it specifically mentioned, but it appears as if this storage is all on one drive.
:)
For that much cash, I think I'd prefer to have two drives, half the size, that replicate each other automagically in case of the failure of one of the drives.
Half a terabyte should be enough for anybody
Space for even more bloatware.
200 Gb for a Hello World program here we come.
siggy played guitar
Maybe I'm just way outside the norm, but... I have found that as my need for storage has increased, my risk of storage device failure has increased even faster. Meaning that a hard drive failure is so devastating it would be worth several times $1,199 to me to have the data recovered. Since this box doesn't have built in redundancy, and no super-fast connection (meaning better than 30MB/sec) for backup to another device... Is there a market for which this device truly appeals?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Simple: ass-etate
Clear accetate sheets are what traditional animation is drawn on, for those that don't get it. Plus I get an informative mod, rather than offtopic
Don't kill my karma, he brought it up.
Letter To Iran
they define terabyte as 10^12 bytes, when OSes will often define it as 2^40. This thing's probably actually 99.5GiB less than advertised (2^40-10^12 = 9,95*10^10 bytes). I wish advertisers would use the MiB, GiB, and TiB notations for storage space - it would make shopping for hard drives a bit more honest...
--- Bwah?
I just picked up a SmartDisk Firelite 40GB portable drive. It is USB 2.0/1.1. The best thing is - no power cables required! They provide a power connector just in case, because some USB 1.1 connections don't push out enough power. The drive is about the size of a PDA with a brushed aluminum shell. I'm lovin' it. They sell FireWire versions too.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Look at the OS requirements. It doesn't support Linux. Oh well.
[ducks]
Joe
I guess it's not all one big drive.
Nevermind.
Wow, that's a whole lotta bits... ::keeps counting:
C|N>K
Okay....gonna get my terabyte of storage for the grad students for $1200...the Chair will be pleased.
But not when I tell him the $10,000 price tag for the autoloader to back it up.
You can buy 4 250Gb drives in the UK for about 648.60 GBP (1,188.69 USD). Not much cheaper but you'd have the 'I did it my way' geek factor! Plus I'd think SATA is a faster than Firewire? For drives that large your gonna need all the speed you can get!
Where this devices really wins tho is moving large amounts of data. A few of these would be great for replacing tape backups!
How long will this take to format?
here is a mirror of the page just in case... you know...
/product.htm
http://silicon.wack.us/sdmirror/2116203
Natural-Selection Be
Kernel 2.4 and up has USB 2.0 and Firewire support for Mass Storage Devices.
285714 songs in your back pak.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
What's so amazing about that? HD space has been under one dollar per gigabyte for a few years now. Add the cost of RAID and it's still under a buck a gig.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Your terabyte drive, measured in binary, once formatted with a file system, which will come amazingly close to the tera decimal size, when done.
Blimey...it's like this Tardis. It seems to be bigger on the inside that it is on the outide.
Scrab
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
For ~$350, you could buy yourself a PlayStation 2 and the Linux kit, and have yourself a slick looking 1TB Linux powered NFS/Samba server. Sure you could build it yourself cheaper, but think of the cool factor!
We're near the point where it's cost-effective to save the .wav files natively.
set up as JBOD. you'd need a little more intelligence for simple raid structures, but OSX can raid multiple drives, i'm sure XP can too.
they prolly put in a couple oxford 911/912's, daisy chained them internally, and give you access to only one end of the interface...
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Obviously since I can't see a need for such massive amounts of storage, there's no reason anybody should waste their time making this. They should build stuff that solves my problems.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What I'd do with all that space, but I'm sure some corporate customers will be very interested. Just as a side note, I have a LaCie 20 GB Firewire & USB 1.1/2.0 drive from them and it works like a charm. The drive comes up fine in both Windows and Linux (RH 8, 2.4.20-28) and is fast enough to compile programs right on it. I would definitely trust this product, too bad I can't afford it I would take a week off from work justto try and fill it up.
From what I've heard from hard drive technicians, when drives are mounted vertically they tend to have more mechanical problems than with horizontal mounting.
I would certainly not spend $1200 on "1 TB" of storage that used vertically mounted drives.
Individual 250GB drives are going for $150 on sale, so that leaves $600 for a drive enclosure ($100), power supply (included with the enclosure), and dual USB2/Firewire interface chip ($50). Unless there is a 5 year warranty or some other feature, I'd rather put something together myself using horizontal mounting and save at least a few hundred dollars.
Alternatively, one could buy four USB2/Firewire 250GB 8MB cache external drives for $230 each and still save money that way -- as well as reducing the chance of failure.
All right, I lied.
Surely, the only reason someone would want a drive this big is to pirate music/movies!!! ;)
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
For example, could one play games off it?
in preparation for the forthcoming XP replacement and a much bigger win386.swp file? BB will be thrilled!
/. I'll concentrate on the most pertinent questions:
What about maintenace issues for these new fangled hard drives?
Since this is
How long will it take to:
Fill with PR0N,Remove PR0N, defrag, fill with misc 0's and 1's, defrag then reformat before buying your new petabyte hdd and selling your old terabyte hdd or handing it down to relatives?
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
A terabyte is about 2**40 bytes. An MD5 hash is 16 or 2**4 bytes. Therefore this drive can store 2**36 MD5 hashes of (say) passwords. So you could launch a dictionary attack on a simple (non-salted) password very quickly and portably.
For systems with 6 char passwords mandated, even if you chose a truly random pswd value (e.g. about 2**6 or 64 choices per character), you can still cover the entire spectrum.
So, given a password hash like this, you could have everything precomputed ahead of time and potentially speed up your brute force attack significantly over one where hashes need to be computed on the fly.
Wonder what the Canadian "tax" on that drive will be.
Probably more than the drive would cost.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
The rumors site are going wild over this new 1 TB drive. Seems there's been some discussion of a big brother to the iPod, the "iPod MEGA!". Prototypes are about the size of a shoe box and purportedly store over a year of music. The external lead-acid battery weights about 80 pounds and fits snugly next to the iPod MEGA! in the included backpack. Introductory price of about $28,000. Steve Jobs is at it again!
Imagine a beo... ...but sometimes a cigar box ISN'T a cigar box
...yeah but are there Linux drivers?
Talk about a smokin' hard drive!
There's gotta be an obligatory tomacco reference here somewhere.
Finally, enough portable room for Larry Ellison to take his ego with him wherever he goes!
Lastly, Dubya will include this in his "war on tera"
Firstly, I am a Linux bigot. Secondly, the current filesystem technology sucks in key regards. Like dealing with recovering filesystems.
/lost+found was a staggering 85 MB!!! 4 million entries right under /lost+found alone! 12 million files altogether.
/lost+found!?!?!?! Please??????
Recently I had to help recover a large filesystem (Terabytes), when things went bad. The "directory file" for
It was ugly. tar, sed, awk, find, and other stuff just croaked. None of them worked properly. Only by modifying GNU tar very carefully was I able to get a backup.
Yes, the original sysadmin was incompetent. Yes, they should've done backups. Yes, they should have at least upgraded things to something recent.
But please, can we at *least* move away from the 30 year-old approach of sticking *everything* right under
How long before these start showing up on ebay full of porn?
Or a solid month of recording of these "voyeur dorms" that seem to be all the craze!
You cant make anything foolproof, they'll only invent better fools.
Every time we get a [peta,tera]byte in a box story, I like to quantify the cost of a [peta,tera]byte:
Data from Pricewatch.
You can buy hard drive space for $0.61 per GB (160GB for $98)
The cheapest TB array would run you only $660, with 10 100GB drives at $66 each.
For $16 more you can equip with 4 250GB drives at $676 total, or $169 each (less than the cost of the extra power supply you'd need for the previous array, not to mention drive controllers, etc)
So we can easily get 1TB for under $700.
A 1PT (peta byte, or 1,000,000 GB) drive is now $612,500.00 - easily less than the cost of many of today's houses, while consuming vastly more power.
-Adam
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unprecendented 1 terabyte capacity
Yeah, that was NEVER going to happen. We never saw it coming!
Ok. Enough sarcasm for today. Back to work.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
With 4 250GB EIDE HDs @$169, that's $676 for 1TB on any 2-IDE motherboard. Those PCs run for less than $200, with ports, CPU, RAM, etc. Since Linux is free, you can get a complete 1TB server for 85% of that price, with FireWire, USB, 100bT ethernet, PCI, etc. And it's a server running Linux, which offers RAID mirroring etc.
--
make install -not war
this occurs almost ten years to the day that I said to a friend "A GIGABYTE? Who could ever use that much space?"!
if you don't feel better tomorrow, we'll just cut your legs off about here. - Theodoric of York
I can't speak to the Mac compatability since I don't have any, but getting LaCie external drives to work on PCs is an exercise in frustration.
My shop picked up one of their external firewire tape drives for backing up a win2k server. Spent a couple days trying to get it to work with any of several backup software packages. Called them and was told that it's only supported with one backup program on Win2k.
Swapped it (they wouldn't refund our money) for an external firewire DVD burner. The DVD burner works most of the time but it's extremely slow and the system (we've tried it on several) occasionally decides it doesn't exist.
...on how long till it becomes self aware?
c-hack.com |
It only holds something like 72 hours of DV. HDTV streams are somewhere in the vicinity of 10-25 Mbps (DV is 25 Mbps or roughly 15 Gb/hr).
That's actually not a lot of space once you get into multimedia.
But backup/recovery of a terabyte of data is not exactly trivial. Re-scanning and re-syncing a large disk array can take over a day. Moving that data across a 100mbps ethernet would require anywhere from 38 to 60 hours.
The cost isn't too bad (close to $1/Gb), but I'd prefer to see it reconfigured as a RAID5 unit.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Imagine a beo... opps I mean imagine a station wagon full of these. :)
-B
Our needs will expand.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I want to build my own external USB 2.0 drive; however searching on google etc. has not yielded any pertinent results. I know this is off topic but can a do it yourselfer do this? Thanks for the input good or bad.
Terabyte disk = $1200 usd.
Air ticket to Thaiti first class = $6000 usd.
Having a Margarita by the beach = $20 usd
Blackmailing your former employer with all their sensitive databases now in your posession= PRICELESS!!!.
I mean, if there's ever a geek president, he needs something to fondle the interns with.
Google found this link:
i gf oot_ata_hard_drives
http://www.quantum.com/am/products/harddrives/b
I think it is an enclosure with one of these. I Just would like to know if it has a proprietary controller.
I recently bought a LaCie 160GB firewire drive to house my ever-expanding music and photo library, and I was going to buy one of their 500GB firewire drives a few days ago, as my home video library is reaching the limits of the 400GB array where it is currently housed.
Man, am I glad I waited. The 500GB model was going to augment my array, but now I'll just wait and buy the 1TB drive as a replacement. I can ditch the very loud double-wide server case that houses the array, and skim down to a smaller box with quiet(er) external drives.
i had the model that came before the d2 body. the internal fan in that drive was loud enough to keep me up at night. thank god they fixed that feature with the d2. judging from the size of this thing, i wouldn't be surprised if they went back to using internal fans. that would be reason enough for me not to buy one. (if i had $1100 laying around.)
By the time the first owner of this thing has finished defragging, I would be able to buy this for half the price.
I personally would not feel comfortable with this device. They make no mention of how your data is protected if one of the drives in it goes bad. With this device you probably have to send everything back to them to fix with no guarantee of data preservation.
Even though this device "looks cool" I'll stick to the RAID system that I built in my fileserver at home. It holds almost as much data, costs less, and if something in it breaks I can fix it quickly without any loss of data.
How long is the expected life of a drive like this, especially vis-a-vis smaller drives?
a 4bay enclosure for $150 and add four 250GB drives at 170 bucks per drive, about $830 bucks...($850 or so with shipping charges and other misc. fees).
Of course, it's not exactly 1TB (2^40)...more like 1 trillion bytes (1.0x10^12). Replacing one of the drives with a 320GB, and voila! (the total cost will go up too but still less than a grand.)
Now take a few of these, and set up a RAID5 (can be done with linux or win2k/XP) and boom....reliable, high-capacity storage.
Does anyone know if two of the firewire interfaces can be in use at the same time? If so, it would make for a nice little SAN for two machines.
I back up all of my home machines at night to a pair of 250GB drives. I'd love something like this.
It's been said before, but too bad it doesn't seem to implement any kind of on-board RAID.
I swear to God that a few nights ago I had a dream where a company released 1TB of storage in a small formfactor. Of course, in my dream, the cost was under $1/gigabyte, and its technology was introduced by a friendly Vulcan-like alien species ... but hey, you can't have everything.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
now weve seen the first commercial 1TB drive (even if it is 4 drives raided together, I conservatively estimate that we will see normal-sized TB drives within ~10 months. The problem is, most people won't know what to do with the extra space (im only using ~40% of my 60GB hd, and thats without bothering to uninstall everything I don't use). The only thing normal people will find to put on these when they come out are films copied from dvds. How long til the copy-protection people slam down on these things for encouraging dvd copying?
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
Because the world needs more ugly templates and clip art.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
$1199.00/1000 (GB) = $1.19 per Gig
not the greatest i've seen
...and mirror them in real time.
If you've got the data to fill one of these, chances are you've got the budget for that kind of redundancy.
We use LaCie external drives all the time to ship data (FedEX is faster that 100Mbs coast to coast).
I recently tried to buy a couple of the 500GB "big disks" but they were out of stock everywhere, so had to settle for the 320GB version (2 160GB drives in a box). They must be connected with striping, because the I/O is a lot faster that single disks.
4 drives may be even better, but don't count on them being available in quantity in February. That's when you can start to back order them.
I figured you could use software raid to use the device as a raid array. However, would you be able to see the seperate drives or would it simply look like one large drive to anything connecting from the outside?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does anyone have the HOWTO for upgrading my tivo with one of these? I really need 1250 hours of capacity.
Yes, yes. Everybody already knows this. Hard drive manufacturers have been usin the old 1,000,000 bytes = 1 megabyte crap for decades. This isn't new by any means.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
African or european? and it all depends on the
actual weight-ratios anyway.
Does anyone know when there will be notebook harddrives with 80 GB and 7200 rpm (by now I've just come across the 60GB ones from Hitachi)
As with all things in life pr0n is mutating and rowing faster and faster, it was not long ago that the only pr0n video you needed to keep was Pam and Tommy, now we have Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson, tomorrow we'll have a ton more empty headed cuties to fast forward through, and unless we get a pr0n.cache.google.com then we're stuck with filling more and more hard drive space, just incase we want to show the people what pr0n was like back in the day, if anyone wants to start a petition to Google for our pr0n cache just let me know.
How many terabytes would be required to hold all of the porn that's available online?
A decent company that actually posts the speed of the drive with the different transmission methods available instead of just saying "hey it's got usb 2.0!!"
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Entrager is spot on.
I'm sure I could fill it up in a week with pr0n.. :)
It feels like a long time since the 250GB drives arrived, there's a 300GB Maxtor but only in 5400 RPM.
What's the next increment and when will it come?
Is there a hard drive rumor site I haven't found?
Simon
cf Back to the future
Actually, the worse you could lose would be 250GB to a single head crash.
Unless there was such a thing as a head crash so catastrophic that it exploded outside the case taking 3 other drives with it.
1*10^12 B = 1*10^6 MB
1*10^6 MB / 12 MB/s = 83,333.3333333 s
83,333.333 s = 1,388.88888 min
1,388.888 min = 23.148 h
23.148 h != 10 days
I personally would not feel comfortable with this device. They make no mention of how your data is protected if one of the drives in it goes bad.
Your data isn't any more protected on this drive than on any other hard drive.
With this device you probably have to send everything back to them to fix with no guarantee of data preservation.
Just like any other hard drive.
Even though this device "looks cool" I'll stick to the RAID system that I built in my fileserver at home. It holds almost as much data, costs less, and if something in it breaks I can fix it quickly without any loss of data.
A RAID array is not a backup solution. It's a fault tolerance solution. There are several scenarios where you could lose everything on even a RAID5 array (controller failure, multiple disk failure, etc). So your ability to "fix it quickly without any loss of data" is by no means certain.
But, I think you are missing a major point here: unlike your fileserver-based RAID array, this drive is small, quiet, and portable.
I currently have a bigass fileserver at home in a big, loud, power-sucking server case with 8 case fans and dual power supplies (and it sounds like a jet engine). It houses my video library (among other roles) on a 400GB RAID5 array built from six 80GB drives in hotswap drive cages connected to a Promise SX6000 controller. It was relatively cheap, it holds a lot of stuff, and I can replace faulty components off the shelf. It's great. Except for the noise and power requirements of having to house the thing in a big server.
I'm looking at this LaCie 1TB drive as a way to scale down my server to a desktop case just big enough to hold two mirrored system disks, a CD drive, and a DAT drive. The rest of my storage would be in external, self-contained drives.
As for backups, I backup my system disks (where the home directories live) nightly to DAT, but the data in my library (like most) is write once, ready many. I back up my data to DVD before it gets stored on the array, rendering periodic backups unnecessary. If the disk crashes and dies, no big deal. I just have to endure a few hours (days) of restoring files from DVD archives.
And in the event that my home catches fire, I can grab an external drive on the way out the door. Try that with a 100lb server.
>> With this unsurpassed storage capacity, the LaCie Bigger Disk allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music and up to one month of non-stop MPEG-2 video
Soon the harddisk size will be measured in MP3Y (MP3-years) and VM (video-months) to make it easier for the end-user to grasp how much a TB is
Waitaminute. It takes on the order of 8 hours to back up my 20GB exteranl USB 1.1 drive. This dosen't play out.
I have four 250GB WD drives inside my FW800 Dual 1.25GHz G4...and I paid less than $225.00 for each of them.
I guess it's four 250 GB IDE drives, but i couldn't find any info on how it's managed. Having them in raid 0 doesn't feel very confident, you lose one you lose it all. And what about heat, four 7200 rpm drives in a small case, let's just hope it's not IBM :)
Not sure I like the analogy between cigars and
HDs... Do you want your HD on fire?
Although, If my HD was on fire, I might get depressed enough to smoke it...
USB 1.1 is 12Mbits per second theoretical, more likely 10Mbps actual. Therein lies the human error, and it's you not me.
...
Because the filesystems that use the disk space have block sizes that are powers of two.
...mass storage was made out of ROCKS! We'd roll the rock into the road for one, and back out again for zero, and we LOVED it! It never crashed...except when a mob of angry Palestinians happened by and flung our rocks at nearby Jews. It may sound flakey, but try to name a mass storage technology that can stand up to an angry mob of Palestininans...
Tell me again -- how many bits in a trilobite?
250 GB drives (YMMV) ~= 4x$170
==
$830
Have fun. No G4 requirement to use the 800 Firewire interface, which is the only available on this solution.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
10) We're lonely geeks who need lots of pr0n. /. troll post... wait... we'd need more space.
9) So we can install all *insert large number here* linux distributions!
8) We wanna convert our l337 collection of mp3s/oggs to wav.
7) Like there isn't already enough stuff on your desk
6) It runs on linux.
5) To give Microsoft an excuse to bloat windows even more.
4) To store every
3) Because I must have every game ever made.
2) Chicks love large hard drives.
1) Who cares if we need it? It's COOL!
Jason Faulkner
Old Os Administrator
jason@oldos.org
oldos.
** One dollar = 10 cents
I'd rather have 500G (or 300G, whatever) in RAID1 than a single TB that's unmirrored.
*Boom* There goes your life's 'savings'.
What -I- want is a modular drive cage with the GigE, firewire, and USB 2.0 (or at least GigE and one of the other two). There'd be maybe 20Mb of flash memory of some kind for the system. The device would sit on a network and act as a file server. It would come without any drives, so you could pick and chose the drive config that you want: 1 drive, two drives RAID1, 3 RAID5, etc.
The device would then have a slick little web and/or terminal interface similar to what routers have to configure it. It could serve as a PDC, do roaming profiles for windows, and have the option to do NFS stuff.
It would be -the- 'consumer product' of servers.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Fine, 1 terabyte isn't a lot, but what's next? Hard drive sizes are just going to get larger, and once HDTV multimedia is conquered what's The Next Big Thing? I for one don't see any Next Big Thing, I mean what's larger than high-resolution porn... er, I mean videos?
I agree with other members, 1 terabyte is a heck of a lot of space.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
or, rather, 1994, I worked in a marketing firm dealing with hirez scans for pre-press. We were _so_ geeked when we got two Micronet 1GB external SCSI drives (giga-bricks). The art directors fought tooth and nail over them, but we, as tech support, of course needed one for our...ahem...duties.
I seem to remember they cost about $1200 each, too. 1000x increase in storage in 10 years for the same $$...
on a side note, I just trashed an ancient SCSI 230MB Syquest drive that's been taking up space in my closet. I got 256MB USB 2.0 pen drive for less than 1/3 of the price of a single cartritge for the thing...
Backup to a second set of DVDs and give them
to a friend in another country...
Man, technology is advancing very quicly. I just think about our purchase about a year ago of a RAID array with 8 320gig U160 scsi drives. Each drive cost us $1100.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
and I just thre away a 300 baud US Robotics modem last week thinking "surely I'll never need this again"....who knew
A professor a keele university many years ago ( I think I read this originally) developed a system whereby potentially 14 terrabytes could be stored on a credit card sized device. See this
Article it was reckoned that this storage medium could have been manufactured for roughly 30quid (sterling).
Why havent we seen this technology yet ? well, its potentially a disruptive technology having this kind of storage available so cheaply to consumers would cause so many problems in the marketplace. It hasnt happened yet. Make no mistake, although this is a cool development. Just realise that there are things possible that cant be sold for reason of economy.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
We will reach a tim when data will never be deleted permenatly.
Harddrives so large, that if you started writing to it at the fastest bus speed it would take years to fill.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sorry, but that's not the way the statistics work. The probability of a failure on a single drive is a cumulative distribution function. The longer the drive has been running, the higher the probability of a failure. Also, it's not linear. There are usually a few failures early in life, then relatively few for a long period of time, and then a bunch of failures again clustered around some point in time. It's kind of like a poisson distribution, but with a long head instead of a long tail. When the manufacturer reports MTBF, I suspect they're talking about where the mean point is on this curve (i.e. at what point in time have 50% of the drives failed). I don't work in the storage industry, so this is just an educated guess. Someone will probably correct me on this. Now, if you want to figure out the cumulative distribution function for a bunch of disks, you can't simply divide the MTBF by the number of disks. Instead, the probability of at least one drive failure is calculated as one minus the probability that none of the drives have failed. So, if there's a 10% chance that a single drive fails within the first year, the probability of at least one failure in a 4 drive box within that same year is 1 - .9^4 = .6.
[Reposting with better formatting.]
Sorry, but that's not the way the statistics work.
The probability of a failure on a single drive is a cumulative distribution function. The longer the drive has been running, the higher the probability of a failure. Also, it's not linear. There are usually a few failures early in life, then relatively few for a long period of time, and then a bunch of failures again clustered around some point in time. It's kind of like a poisson distribution, but with a long head instead of a long tail.
When the manufacturer reports MTBF, I suspect they're talking about where the mean point is on this curve (i.e. at what point in time have 50% of the drives failed). I don't work in the storage industry, so this is just an educated guess. Someone will probably correct me on this.
Now, if you want to figure out the cumulative distribution function for a bunch of disks, you can't simply divide the MTBF by the number of disks.
Instead, the probability of at least one drive failure is calculated as one minus the probability that none of the drives have failed.
So, if there's a 10% chance that a single drive fails within the first year, the probability of at least one failure in a 4 drive box within that same year is 1 - .9^4 = .6.
"...truly plug and play, this device requires no driver or software installation for Windows XP and Mac OS X users." My guess is that is simply interacts with the appropriate firewire or usb bus and needs no drivers. Linux could handle that just fine. Too bad they don't say so... they might get some more sales. Odds are though that it works just fine under Linux, but they're support staff aren't training to handle people using Linux environments. Note the 19'' rack mount option listed on the page though. They're obviously thinking enterprise use.
I had the opportunity to see one at MacWorld. They are very hefty and made of ultra-heavy gauge aluminum (feels more solid than the G5 case). Also very heavy.
The aluminum case is not enough to dissipate the heat generated by the 4 drives, so they also have a fan, but it is a very quiet one (as much as one can jusdge such a thing in a trade show).
The case is also available in a 2 drive 1/2 terabyte version for around $600.
180 GB for MST3K
30 GB for Simpsons
200 GB for Music
200 GB for Movies
100 GB for Doctor Who
etc...
Nice. Two + software raid on a laptop anyone?
I mean geez, I was planning 1TB for my next machine but I would at least have the drives in a normal computer case connected to SATA. Not squished into a tiny lil case to cook themselves nicely.!!
> oh, you mean you want a 1 TiB array.
That is SO FUCKING retarded. Tebibyte. Who the FUCK is going to say that. God Damn.
I still remember the RAMAC.
Twenty disk platters about a yard across, stacked up with LOTS of space between them. Hydraulic seek mechanism "several" seeks per second. (I hear it the fingers off more than one engineer when the interlock button was accidentally pushed.) Hub about a foot across with the motor built into it. (Extra windings, too, so you could repair the drive if one winding burned out.) Brown oxide glued onto the disks. If you need to change the disk assembly you need to take off the ceiling for another floor's worth of height and bring in a crane - which in some places was cheaper than shipping out the dead box and bringing in a replacement.
Don't recall the data density but it wasn't much. (The first model (305) had about 4.4 MB, or about 110 KB per surface, but the one I dealt with was a bit later vintage, attached to a 7094.)
Hear they had a head crash on one which filled the pretty plexiglass enclosure of the rotating mechanism with brown oxide ground off the disks. When they brought in the crane and removed the disks they discovered that the dust had been selectively attracted to the magnetic bit boundaries and had thus "developed" the disk (as was sometimes done deliberately with a solvent-based system applied to mag tape, to check head alignment and the like). You could read the data (naked-eye visible bits) on the tracks that hadn't been ground off.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> 2^40 bytes is represented by a value known as a Tebibyte.
By whom? You fucking wanker. Only a loser would say Tebibyte.
SsssssssssMOKIN' !!!!!
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
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Fair enough, I knew my method was not statistically correct but errs on the conservative side. From what I read, your method would be quite a bit worse.
:)
You can probably tell I hated economics and statistics
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I hope the following issues were considered:
Does it come preformatted?
How long does it take to perform a defragment?
I think the hard drive metaphor for storage is starting to reach its limits...
78 years later, Analysis complete. 78% defragmentd. Would you like to defragment now?
what's a factor of 8 between friends?
Mostly audio/visual. If I'm doing visual work and need a big, fast, portable scratch disk, this would be great. Ok, so maybe it fails. That's fine, I don't use it for finished products, just for all the intermediary data and temp files.
Not to mention you could buy 2 or more of them and RAID them.
Go look it up. SI is defined in base 10 and only in base 10. Kilo is defined to mean 10^3 not 2^10. So technically to use SI prefixes in base 2 is an incorrect usage. The IEC convention is standardised on base 2. It's not SI, but big deal, SI doesn't cover what is needed.
...for a long time. Mainly because of transfers. It's going to be a good bit until transfering uncompressed audio is trivial compared to compressed audio. Given that it's easy to get compression of 10:1 or more, that's a big difference. So let's say your connection is quick enough to get a whole CD album in 10 minutes uncompressed (fast connection, that would mean at about 9mbits/sec of throughput). Fine, but if it were compressed 10:1 you'd need to only wait a minute, which is clearly less of a pain.
Also people will like to say space for no percieved cost. Since most people believe 128k MP3 to be "CD quality" why not get the space savings?
i told my GF i wanted this, and she was like "Why, because it's big?", "...yeah..." "Are you trying to compensate for anything?"
Windows and Mac only. 1TB formatted filespace may vary, depending on your OS platform. Let's see that's about 900G for your Windows files, 100G for consequent viral infections and spyware, and a few extra gigs just for that web browser you don't want. Next....
And in the event that my home catches fire, I can grab an external drive on the way out the door. Try that with a 100lb server.
I guess your kids, at 100lbs total, passed out in their bedroom are fucking screwed then, eh?
They're great, until they suddenly fail to mount. Then they show up as unformatted under Disk Management. Lacie offered a patch for the first batch that did this. Now it's happening again a few months later. Losing half a terabyte of data is very inconvenient.
Worse I KNOW I've going to have to explain, at length, to someone's boss, why 1TB of usable storage on a SAN storage server with 8GB of battery backed write through cache and total redundant hot swap parts and 400MB/s transfer rate doesn't also cost $1199....
Back it up? What are you going to back it up to?
http://www.lacie.com/imgstore/product_container/ biggerdisk_led.jpg remind you of anything else?
Yes HAL.. will do what you say.. Don't kill us
I couldn't think of a sig.
1TB of data would take quite a number of discs to backup.
DVD (single-layer) - 214
CD-R - 1363
1000 cds would take a lot more room than the drive itself.
RAID = Redundant Array of INDEPENDANT Disks.
I don't see where you get inexpensive when it's $1000+ for a drive.
For RAID to work the failures must be partitioned from other parts of the system. This is why the disks are independant of each other. If one fails the othes keep going.
Please excuse my last reply. I flew off the handle, sorry about that.
You where correct.
Now back to figuring out why one of my servers is giving strange errors like this:
kernel: MCE: The hardware reports a non fatal, correctable incident occurred on CPU 1.
localhost kernel: Bank 0: c458400000000833
and I bet people will still complain they cant get all there porn on it.
Can't you just imagine the annoying dog in Windows XP try to find something in that thing and just come out, give up on it and have a cigarette.
With any luck, I'll be dead in less than 100 years, so real reliability isn't a concern. Currently I just buy a new PC every once-in-a-while, even if I don't "need" it. Just like cars.
How old am I? I should be so lucky as to see 100 year old I Love Lucy episodes!
Hell, as a Windows (tm) user, I am better off starting from scratch every couple of years anyhow.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
For businesses, the cost of primary storage isn't the problem. The problem is in getting the data backed up and offsite to a secure location within a reasonable amount of time.
At the moment, just in capital terms, the cost of a backup infrastructure to cope works out at around $40 per gigabyte once you have included the needed network infrastructure, libraries, tape drives, tape media and that's assuming you can use incremental backups, for RDBM systems which you can't back up incrementally it is closer to $150 per gigabyte.
So you're going to have to spend between $40,000 and $150,000 to back up your $1000 1TB of space.
Or you buy 2 of them and spend 8 months trying to synchronise your 1TB of data over your ADSL line.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Play Well
Nothing at all new about this - someone else did it last year: http://vader.inow.com/~drbob/fwcase.html
When the manufacturer reports MTBF, I suspect they're talking about where the mean point is on this curve (i.e. at what point in time have 50% of the drives failed). I don't work in the storage industry, so this is just an educated guess. Someone will probably correct me on this.
MTBF is a statistic on an aggregate. It works like this, you take a whole bunch of hard drives and turn them on. The MTBF is the average cummulative operationing hours of all the drives before the first drive failure.
so with an MTBF of 500,000 you could expect to run 60 drives for about a year before one failed, on average.
But this usually doesn't account for non ideal conditions--such as jarring during shipment, temperature, and other environmentals.
However MTBF loses meaning when the aggregate is reduced in size. So it doesn't mean that on average a single drive will last 500,000 hours.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's probable that anyone with kids wouldn't have enough time or money for the setup he described.
And, if he does, he probably has them backed up as well, maybe frozen embryos packed in portable coolers, sitting by the door...
This has to be 3-4 drives in a box without replication or redundancy (since you can't swap anything). That means you just greatly increased your risk of losing a whole lot of data at once because if any one drive goes, all your data is gone.
Get a real RAID drive or separate disks and you'll have more safety and more flexibility.
I don't see GNU/Linux mentioned amoung the supported systems.
If they don't release the specs, it will be useless for a long, long time!
(Unless you're sattiesfied using it under a Mac or whatever. Not that I have anything against a Mac, but I don't have one. I only have a few Debian GNU/Linux boxes.)
Lacie liked my idea.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
gah don't start that argument again! I'm pretty sure both versions of the accronym go way back, anyhow. The idea behind "inexpensive" is that you are getting reliability out of several cheap drives rather than 1 really high-quality one, not that the whole array is supposed to be cheap.
Jeremy
Almost always to signify relief, or just to release the pressure of the awesome impression you get from the direction of technology today. It's incredible, and again, we are given a great example of the things that make us smile every day.
Strange, I always though 1 terabyte was 2^40 bytes or 1,099,511,627,776
--- This meme is memory intensive
Given the continuing weakness of the USD against other currencies, notably the UKP, can we expect to pick them up for, oooh, about twenty quid in a few weeks?
I'm going to buy one of these and connect it to the l33t USB 1.1 interface on my laptop. It will take me about 8 days to fill it with stuff, given that I can saturate the 12 Mbps USB interface.
why should it be cheap? if you want cheap, wait 5 years!
if you *need* 1TB of storage, chances are you don't want to risk it on some new untested tech: you'll be using SANs etc and doing it the Correct But Expensive Way.
The only use for this I can see is someone who wants vast, not-particularly-vital storage: perhaps if you're acting as a short term store for a *lot* of video...
This, and the awaited dual processor 3ghz G5 are now on my wishlist... i don't know who'd buy them for me, but there you go, both added!
Heh, on my computer a byte is 16 bits. It has no way of directly reading or writing octets.
Looks like I'm going to have to buy another box of floppies for backups....
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
What a bummer, 1,000,000,000,000 bytes is really only about 931GB, before formatting. This is where I hate that difference between 1024 and 1000 being defined as a megabyte
So, if there's a 10% chance that a single drive fails within the first year, the probability of at least one failure in a 4 drive box within that same year is 1 - .9^4 = .6.
.9^4 = .6561
.9^4 = .3439
1 -
I admit personal bias against "mebi" and related prefixes because it sounds stupid, but I also think they should be done away with for essentially the same reason as the parent poster. "Mebi" sounds for all the world like some drunk engineer came up with a clever abbreviation for "binary megabyte" and convinced his boss to make it The Standard; history has shown that, except in totalitarian environments, arbitrarily declaring that a de facto standard is wrong never works. (For a demonstration, try counting the number of people who use MiB, GiB and so on to make fun of those who don't, as opposed to those who use it because they really, honestly think that's the right way to do it. Or just look at what measurement system the US is still using.)
I think the real answer is to just ditch the binary units, period. While it may be hard to get away from them at the lowest levels (and I'm not so sure of that--think CDs with 2692(?)-byte raw sectors, 1514-byte Ethernet packets, etc.), there's little reason that files have to be allocated in blocks that are multiples of 512 or 1024 bytes, and none at all that the user should have to be aware of that fact if they are. Leave powers of two to kernel hackers, and just do everything in userland with decimal units.
As far as temporary kludges go, I much prefer the GNU dd way: MB [read "megabyte"] = 1000*1000, M [read "meg"] = 1024*1024. It's still kludgey, but it strikes a better balance with common usage than declaring common usage wrong by fiat.
Kernel 2.4 and up has USB 2.0 and Firewire support for Mass Storage Devices.
Yes, but the 2.4 EHCI (USB 2.0) driver hangs from time to time, and the 2.4 Firewire mass storage driver gets a bit flipped about once every 100 gigabytes of data. (It's rather disturbing to run md5sum on the same file twice and get two different values . . .)
Such as?
Does anybody have good/bad experiences with (esp. non-Windows based) alternatives? Which RAID controllers/drives/distros are you using?
As the former poster noted, "inexpensive" doesn't mean "cheap for you as a consumer".
Consider two extremes:
One is what NASA considers a cheap mission to Mars.
The other is what you consider cheap.
The "inexpensive" in RAID is inbetween.
It gets worse than that when you stop to consider just how slow most people type! I know most g33ks are wizards at the keyboard, but most normal people can't type much faster than 50 wpm or so, and that's if they're good... At those rates, it'll take a several lifetimes to fill up 1TB.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It used to stand for that back when you could get a reliable drive with $$$. Then it made sense to use cheaper (still a fortune..) stuff due to extra redundancy.
I guess your kids, at 100lbs total, passed out in their bedroom are fucking screwed then, eh?
You make the incorrect presumption that my wife and I have (or even want) children. However, in the nightmare bizarro realm where I would share my home with small, obnoxious people who drive me crazy and drain money from my wallet, then I would make *them* grab the hard drives on the way out the door. I'd be waiting for them in the yard.
Without a narrow set of assumptions, my friend, there would be no humor.
> That's why you use capitals. 1 Kb is 1024 bytes...
Why in the hell would the above garbage be moderated upward? Damn idiots w/ mod points.
OK, so you claim we should use Kelvin bytes as units to represent 1024 bytes. Are you on drugs? What does a temperature measurement have to do with bits or bytes?
Takes about and hour to format my TerabyteBox. Thats doing all four simultaneously. The Terabytebox is of course a REAL data storage solution and it has a lot more features. terabytebox.com
Close, but no cigar. Your calculations are way off.
Kidding. I just had to say it.