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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!
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
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.
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...
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
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!
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.
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!
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That $150 enclosure supports ONLY 2 IDE drives, so you're going to need a more expensive enclosure to do the job.
All well and good, but if you've got no case to put them in, no-dice.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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?
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.