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."

Comments

Slow interface = bottleneck

[ackthpt]

I bought a putzy little 40Gb Que USB drive a while back, it's depressing how long it takes to transfer stuff to/from it, but makes a good archive drive, particularly for large transfers.

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? :-)

Re:Slow interface = bottleneck

[C10H14N2]

...and what would you be backing up TO that five hours would be considered slow for a terabyte? A SCSI RAID? If you had another SCSI RAID, why would you use a firewire device as your primary? What say you're doing this to a standard backup medium like DLT. Most DLT subsystems that can handle this capacity run below 55MB/s, in fact most are FAR below that (like 11MB/s)--and they cost several times what this device does, so why not just buy two? Even if this thing connected via Ultra-320 SCSI, you'd still be backing up slower than FireWire 800, unless your backup device was another RAID on the same SCSI chain. In either case, would you be buying this thing? Clearly, the Firewire interface in this drive is hardly the bottleneck in terms of backing up its contents. At the price in question, it's a damned good buy, even if you needed a second for backup.

USB 1.1?

[cybermace5]

Wow. I calculate it would take about 10 continous days to download or upload one of these over USB 1.1.

Re:Not a 1TB *disk*

[ryanr]

We were discussing that. I assume it has to look to the host like one logical drive. I don't suppose there's any chance they actually did RAID 5 with 5 drives for 4x250 drives worth of space.

"All the space, and 1/4 the reliability!!!"

Re:Man...

[KiwiEngineer]

I had a friend who was involved in a small way with the RoTK in Wellington. From all accounts they hauled data from one render farm to another using big pelican cases (the ones that you can push over a waterfall and not get your camera inside wet or damaged) full of hard drives.

When you have to get a person to drive across town to move the hard drive from one place to another, having a few extra hard drives in that pelican case wasn't a biggie.

Re:Sorry..

[jangell]

It seems like to me that it wouldn't be all that reliable. You've got four 250 gig hard drives packed into the smallest space they could. Scary.

They also mention hooking several of them together, that means if you hook even as many as 2 of them together, you are 8 times more likely to fail then a standard drive. I'm sure they are also using the cheapest drives and technology they can possible use to make a profit at that price.

Don't think this is the wave of the future.

Re:Man...

[Pyrosophy]

I, for one, welcome our new terabyte overlords.

Interestingly, where normal humans had needs of 100 meg, 1 gig, 100 gig storage spaces, this represents the first leap beyond what the ordinary person could ever hope to use. It's got plenty applications, but not normal user applications.

Unless, of course, storage companies start getting smart and emphasizing fully redundant backups. Think about it. Wouldn't you pay an extra $400 to make sure your parents' data was backed up three separate places, virtually eliminating the chances they would lose it all.

Losing data is the primary reason people don't trust computers. Our terabyte overlords could make it that much more likely this won't happen.