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A Terabyte In A Cigar Box

Posted by timothy on from the drool-drool-droll dept.

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."

25 of 691 comments (clear)

  1. Sorry.. by holzp · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cuban hard drives are illegal to import in the United States.

    1. Re:Sorry.. by jangell · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Sorry.. by elmegil · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Don't think this is the wave of the future.

      Because after all, we haven't been doing RAID for a long time now. Oh wait, doesn't RAID mean Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks?

      Come on, it certainly has its reliability concerns, but if you mirror one to another, where's the difference between this and two racks of smaller disks? Seems to me that 4 points of failure on each side of the mirror rather than a dozen or two could actually HELP reliability.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
  2. Slow interface = bottleneck by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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? :-)

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:Slow interface = bottleneck by C10H14N2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ...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.

  3. So many ports! by rco3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!
  4. wow... by TWX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:wow... by xankar · · Score: 5, Funny

      five.

      consider me a soothsayer.

      --
      ~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
  5. Finally! by pantycrickets · · Score: 5, Funny

    A cigar box full of porn!

    1. Re:Finally! by Sideshow+Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Don't laugh... but when my grandpa died a couple of years ago, he actually had a cigar box of naughty pictures. Now we think of him with a little different perspective. FYI... my brother won the box of porn in a raffle.

  6. Missing bytes growing fast by Humba · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The bytes lost to marketing(1024*1024*1024*1024 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes) vs 1,000,000,000,000 bytes are 3x larger than the drive on the machine I'm using right now.

    I know this is "just the way" drives are measured, but all those missing 24 bytes are really starting to add up. --H

    1. Re:Missing bytes growing fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Technically:
      1000000000000 Bytes are:
      976562500 KiB
      953674 MiB
      931 GiB .909 TiB

  7. "Bigger Disk" by EmCeeHawking · · Score: 5, Funny

    The primary subtitle is "Bigger Disk", which is suspiciously similar to the subject lines of half of the spam I get.

  8. For the record... by Guano_Jim · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:For the record... by Lxy · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but considering that it's small, you can probably fit 20... yes, you can fit the library of congress into a Volkswagon!

      --

      There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
      :wq
  9. proprietary controller by lukior · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. Hey Epson, by teamhasnoi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    look at Lacie! They actually INCLUDE all the cables for all the interfaces.

    Of course, for a grand and some change, this thing better make the bed the next morning, you follow...

  11. Re:Man... by KiwiEngineer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!!
  12. Re:Man... by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  13. $1/GB by Saeger · · Score: 5, Insightful
    1 Terabyte (capacity) disk for (get this) only $1,199.00!(USD)

    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
  14. Re:USB 1.1? by chunkwhite86 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    How about over Parallel port? (like zip drive)

    Or infrared port?

    Or PS/2 keyboard port?

    Or by carrier pigeon?

    --
    I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
  15. Re:No, only 0.9094 TB by sciwhiz007 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know, I know, I'm nitpicking.

    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:p hysics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html+gibibyte+sit e:gov&hl=en&start=1&ie=UTF-8

    --
    Read my journal here.
  16. Re:Man... by TCM · · Score: 5, Funny

    #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
  17. Re:Man... by athakur999 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  18. Nice box by majid · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.