Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
More than you could ever possibly view, maybe. Wimp.
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."
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
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.
Of course, for a grand and some change, this thing better make the bed the next morning, you follow...
Now is that a real terabyte or just 1 trillion bytes?
From the article: "* 1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Once formatted, the actual available storage capacity varies depending on operating environment."
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Kernel 2.4 and up has USB 2.0 and Firewire support for Mass Storage Devices.
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
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!
Apple? Apple invented this system?
Every HD manufacturer known to man has used this "fake" system.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
We're near the point where it's cost-effective to save the .wav files natively.
You know, I do think Apple was one of the last companies to downgrade to 1gb = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Compaq, Dell, et al, started doing that long before.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
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
I am already over half a Terabyte and I know many others who are over the terabyte mark. I want a box that can store my entire DVD collection uncompressed for easy navigation. A terabyte sits in the neighborhood of 200-250 movies. To build the ultimate movie jukebox i need more like 10 terabytes.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
I know, I know, I'm nitpicking.
p hysics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html+gibibyte+sit e:gov&hl=en&start=1&ie=UTF-8
1 TB (terabyte) = 10^12 bytes, NOT 2^40 bytes. 2^40 bytes is represented by a value known as a Tebibyte.
Don't believe me? Check out http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html or google's cache at http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:lbDn9HCN0SAJ:
Read my journal here.
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.
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!
Apple's? Pfft. Who doesn't do that? Every hard drive I've bought in the last 10 years has done that...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Actually, a long time ago they were going to use the MiB notation.
But then, a movie company sued them for trademark dilution, because they didn't think it was nearly as cool as their movie, MiB = Men in Black.
But then the real problem came when some men came, flashed this thing in their eyes, and the hard drive companies completely forgot about MiB notation, and hence GiB and TiB never came to be.
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.
you could just rotate it 90 degrees and be done with the "vertically mounted flaw". At 11 pounts even the weakest of geeks should be able to move that. Furthermore, the fact you can toss this thing in a backpack, shove it off your desk, or spill coffee onto it is probably more hazardous to your porno^h^htfolio.
...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
Wait, why is this *Apple's* fake system? Doesn't everyone who makes OR sells hard drives do this?
What confuses me is that they define their sizes differently. Some will say
a) 1GB = 1000 MB
b) 1GB = 1000000 KB
c) 1GB = 1000000000 Bytes
Is choice (a) really equal to 1000*1024*1024? See where I'm getting with this?
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.
$1199.00/1000 (GB) = $1.19 per Gig
not the greatest i've seen
I'm not sure what your definition of "unprecedented" is but....http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=un precedented&r=67
:S
It has nothing to do with whether it was predicted to happen
Exactly. The real way to do it is to measure drives in songs. 40 GB = 10K songs, so that means 1 TB = approx. 250K songs. Minus Apple's DRM overhead.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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.
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.
I have four 250GB WD drives inside my FW800 Dual 1.25GHz G4...and I paid less than $225.00 for each of them.
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...
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
** One dollar = 10 cents
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
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.
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
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?
i told my GF i wanted this, and she was like "Why, because it's big?", "...yeah..." "Are you trying to compensate for anything?"
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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 -