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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.
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...
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.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
I remember when 100 megs was cool
...
You youngsters
I have an 1st gen IBM PC here that says 5M was once very cool, so cool it was double-height and you had to park the heads before sneezing, and a PDP-11 in my collection that swears 512K removable disks the size of my satellite dish, with the washing-machine-sized drive that went with them, were all the rage back then.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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
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.
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.
#234 rule on slashdot: never mention something you think is oldskool. Some old fart will come along and tell you about stuff that's been even less desireable to have owned. And they won't stop! Please, make it stop!
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
...on how long till it becomes self aware?
c-hack.com |
you whipppersnappers and your newfangled rules. back in my day, we didn't have a rule #234. old farts used to talk about long gone days ALL THE TIME for no apparent reason ABOUT ANYTHING. And we liked it.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Well, except for 640k of memory....
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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.