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1.6TB In a Shoebox, If You've Got the Money

zmcnulty writes "While not exactly a technological marvel in itself, IO Data Device's new 'HDZ-UE1.6TS' exemplifies the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities -- it's an external hard drive setup offering a total capacity of 1.6TB. Not much larger than four 3.5" hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space. Here's the Japanese press release." (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)

359 comments

  1. 1.6 TB in a shoebox? by wretched22 · · Score: 0

    Brings a whole new meaning to a box full of pr0n...

  2. Obligatory pr0n comment by syntap · · Score: 5, Funny

    But seriously... with this and an optical data line, running your own household Usenet server starts to become practical.

    1. Re:Obligatory pr0n comment by Squalish · · Score: 1

      From this: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info-2003/internet.htm site, it would appear that the total annual usenet postings are around 300 terabytes right now, meaning that if you carried every newsgroup possible, you'd have about a day of retention on only one of these units. Most newsgroup services seem to have an upper bound of about 50gb of capacity.

      On a sidenote:

      Honestly though, why would anyone remotely technically competant buy this? It doesn't even have any redundancy (all raid 0, meaning if a single drive fails, poof). Just what could that much cash buy?

      Here's what I would buy. I'm a gamer, admittedly, but you could leave out all this and just go for a $250 Dell poweredge 420c if you were just looking for NAS (though not sure about their # of 3.5" slots, might not even be able to fit 8 with 5.25" adapters).

      $350 Broadcom RAIDCore BC4852 PCIE raid card
      $1,000 8x 250gb IDE hard drives
      $120 Nforce4 board
      $150 athlon64 3000+
      $300 2gb corsair3200 c2.5
      $150 DIY watercooling system
      $200 Coolermaster Stacker w/ extra drivecage
      $110 Antec True550 EPS12v
      $70 16x DVDRW+-
      $350 6800gt
      $100 Game Theater XP
      Total: $2900
      A full, decked out, near top-notch watercooled gaming system PLUS 1.75TB of redundant storage (Though I would go w/ 1.5TB with double parity).

      *note* I was going to suggest 5 400gb drives in raid5 configuration, but you can get 250gb drives for 50cents/GB rather than 90 cents for the top of the line.

      --
      People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
  3. Creative paperweight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems to me like this will be one of those pieces of equipment we will all "laugh at" next fall. I mean the size is good and all... but it is huge.

    Sorta reminds me of the 270gb MaxAttach file storage unit I have sitting in my rack @ work. The thing is huge... but 3 years ago it was "modern." Now I can buy a 400gb SATA hard drive that is 1/20th the size and has even MORE space.

    Infact -- speaking of which -- with SATA getting bigger and bigger this thing is a "waste of money."

    1. Re:Creative paperweight... by saintp · · Score: 4, Informative
      Infact -- speaking of which -- with SATA getting bigger and bigger this thing is a "waste of money."
      Right on. This past weekend, I priced out a 2.5 Tb roll-your-own NAS box from Newegg for about $2500. Why would I spend $400 more for 900 Gb less?
    2. Re:Creative paperweight... by Squareball · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Exactly. I think I'll wait 2 years and buy a 1.6TB drive at BestBuy for $149.

    3. Re:Creative paperweight... by fatarfy · · Score: 1

      But by then there will be a 500 TB drive on the horizion, so the question really is, when do you buy something like this, when is the best time to get the most bang for your buck?

    4. Re:Creative paperweight... by mostlyalmighty · · Score: 1

      Never...

    5. Re:Creative paperweight... by Cpt_Kirks · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But by then there will be a 500 TB drive on the horizion, so the question really is, when do you buy something like this, when is the best time to get the most bang for your buck?

      About 9 months to a year after it comes out. Newer, faster, larger versions usually come out about then, making the last "new, fast, large" unit fall in price.

      If there has been a jump in technology the time may be shorter, but 9 to 12 months is a good rule of thumb.

      Also, the blood from the "bleeding edge" tends to clot by then...

    6. Re:Creative paperweight... by Ansonmont · · Score: 1

      Buy what you need, plus a little bit more for random clutter. Do you have a huge (legal?) music collection? Do you edit video? Then buy a boatload of storage. If you have a normal size music/video collection and want to back up mail, office docs, pics, etc, then just buy whatever the sweet spot is for external/internal storage.

      I just picked up a 160gb firewire/usb 2.0 external for $129. An 80gb would have been fine, but those are actually MORE expensive now.

    7. Re:Creative paperweight... by OwnedByTwoCats · · Score: 1

      It's an interesting Operations Research question.

      If your needs are growing, do you buy a lot more now, so that you can go longer without needing to replace what you have? Or do you buy just a little more than you currently need, counting on prices to come down so that when you replace the equipment, the extra capacity costs you less.

      My guess is that for PC disk drives, the optimal is probably to buy what you need for 12 to 18 months time. If the costs of moving that data to a new drive are high (i.e. you can't take the system down), then buy more (18 to 24?).

    8. Re:Creative paperweight... by superpulpsicle · · Score: 0

      Is there some shareware/freeware that can tell you the LARGEST CAPACITY compatible with your motherboard? Most manufacturers are terrible at telling you what the limit is. Before you know it, you end up with a useless drive.

    9. Re:Creative paperweight... by nadadogg · · Score: 1

      Any board made in the past year or so can handle drives greater than 137 gigs, but if you choose to run a BSD or linux distro, it can recognize sizes that your motherboard may not. My pre-sp1 xp install only saw 137 gigs of my 160 gig secondary drive, but my debian install on the same box saw the "missing" ~23 gigs. It just depends on your OS of choice. Hell, I've heard of people with old PII boards and BSD using 160gig hard drives without a problem.

      --
      i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
    10. Re:Creative paperweight... by magarity · · Score: 1

      Parent is modded flamebait for what reason? Mentioning 'BestBuy'? If anything, it's 'insightful' as a commentary on how fast hdd price versus capacity drops over time.

    11. Re:Creative paperweight... by Carnivore · · Score: 1

      I work with astronomers, who generate staggeringly large quantities of data. One of our groups is doing a survey of the sky, and they are now occupying 5 TB of space. The rest of the department is using a further 4-5 TB.

      We have decided that it makes the most sense to buy just what we need. By the time we need more, the hardware is cheaper and easier to integrate. We've been using the Promise Ultratrak RAID boxes, which work out really well for us. We can get ~1TB of RAID 10 disk in one unit for ~$4000.

      Now backups are the problem... ugh. The best price/performance/offsite capable solution we've found are firewire hard drives. We just bought 11 300 GB maxtor onetouch drives. They're pretty nice, but I hate having to split the data.

    12. Re:Creative paperweight... by really? · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Because your NAS box does take way more space on your desk? Not that _I_ would even cosider buying this overpriced POS.

      Here (http://www.century.co.jp/products/suto/goodfaith. html) is a four drive enclosure that I saw selling for about 24000 yen - 230 US bucks or so. Add your own 400GB HD for about US$ 350 a piece. The nice thing about these boxes is that you can select whether you want the drives seen as one big drive, or as individual drives.

      I have the 2HD version and I couldn't be happier.

      --

      "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
    13. Re:Creative paperweight... by mesach · · Score: 1

      Anyone know of a US retailer for this, or any product that is similar, I have been looking for something like this for a while.

      --
      moo.
    14. Re:Creative paperweight... by bedessen · · Score: 1

      If you take that to its logical conclusion you'd never buy anything, because there will always be something that's [faster, cheaper, smaller] in the future.

    15. Re:Creative paperweight... by UniverseIsADoughnut · · Score: 1

      Windows XP SP1 fixes this. So it's a non issue.

    16. Re:Creative paperweight... by zlel · · Score: 1

      Not quite what I wanted... was looking more for a 1TB thumbdrive...

    17. Re:Creative paperweight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In case you care, the moderator has been meta-moderated as a dumbass ;)

  4. Recent trend? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities

    This is a recent trend?

    1. Re:Recent trend? by Freexe · · Score: 1

      Does 30 years count as old these days? I hope not!

      --
      "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
    2. Re:Recent trend? by vrt3 · · Score: 3, Funny

      In Korea, only old people are recent.

      --
      This sig under construction. Please check back later.
    3. Re:Recent trend? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      +3 Funny, WTF!?

    4. Re:Recent trend? by capnjack41 · · Score: 3, Funny
      +3 Funny, WTF!?

      Haven't you heard? "Old Korean people" is the new "In Soviet Russia"! It's all the rage.

    5. Re:Recent trend? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In Korea, only old people use 'In Soviet Russia'!

  5. internets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    how many internets can this hold?

    1. Re:internets by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 2, Funny

      Dude. Use a real unit. Like Library of Congresses. I wont' be satisifed until I can get a data-density rate of at least 5.6 Library of Congresses per Hogshead!

    2. Re:internets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      without the pr0n? about 2

  6. couldn't you just buy by hsmith · · Score: 2, Insightful

    6 250gb hd's a good controller for ~$1200? what is the point of this besides having another toy?

    1. Re:couldn't you just buy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      And you'd put the 6 HDs on your christmas tree or what? You need some sort of good enclosure too. Moreover this is a turnkey solution - you don't have to set up RAID/JBOD, it's all done. Of course this has its price.

    2. Re:couldn't you just buy by Forge · · Score: 2, Insightful

      400GB SATA drives are $355 each (See price watch.com).

      A custom microITX Motherboard (With onboard SATA RAID and a reasonable amount of memory plus some kind of embedded OS in FLASH rom can be built for under $300.

      Add a $30 custom case and 5 of these drives and these guys are making $600 a pop above retail. Not bad really.

      My biggest surprise actually is that Dell doesn't sell such a box. Mr.. Dell said in more than one interview that they are in the business of retailing other peoples innovations after slapping on a recognized brand and a decent warranty.

      This storage device is about as obvious a match for them as a "low end" color laser printer.

      --
      --= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
    3. Re:couldn't you just buy by tattoi.nobori · · Score: 2, Insightful

      HDZ: $2900 (turnkey, etc.)
      DIY: ~$1400 (depending on SATA RAID controller.)

      If anybody's really that interested in a turnkey solution, I'll gladly set on up for... say, an even $2000? ^_^

    4. Re:couldn't you just buy by timts · · Score: 1, Informative

      bestbuy had the 160GB $30+tax AR blackfriday
      officemax had the 200GB $50+tax AR blackfriday
      outpost has 160GB $40 AR
      so it could be far less than $1200 to build a machine with 1T capacity
      not to mention the 400GB drives are out for barely $200 each or so

    5. Re:couldn't you just buy by rthille · · Score: 1

      Trouble is, the rebate is only good once per item. I had to track down 3 friends who didn't want a 160gb drive themselves when I setup my 600GB array recently. Drive cost was $200 + tax & shipping. Enclosure was about $300.

      --
      Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
    6. Re:couldn't you just buy by 3terrabyte · · Score: 1

      Limit 15 to 45 per store. The lines were long, and start earlier every year.

      --

      Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?

    7. Re:couldn't you just buy by timts · · Score: 1

      outpost one is available online, not BF deal

      some one hides a 160G drive among the 250G ones, I got there late but I found that one and scored it.

      well, I didnot get the 200G from officemax since I got there even later. I dont need that much storage space myself any way.

    8. Re:couldn't you just buy by chrish · · Score: 1

      $30 for a good aluminum case and a reliable power supply? Let me know where, I can't even find a USB2 enclosure for under $65-ish Canadian.

      --
      - chrish
    9. Re:couldn't you just buy by timeOday · · Score: 1
      I went out to Best Buy at 5:45am on Black Friday. The line was so long I just turned around and left. The problem with Best Buy is they sell some expensive stuff, so the discounts can run into the hundreds and people will wait for hours.

      I headed over to Staples, and bought a 160GB drive for $40 (it was $30 at BB). A guy (fortunately) behind me bought out their stock - he picked up 12 of the drives. He said he asked the cashier if he could get the deal on more than one drive and she said yes. I think she was wrong.

      There were also loads of people back at the "free after rebate" table grabbing armloads of stuff, or one of everything. They may not get their rebates, but that won't help you if they claw their way to the "free" table first.

      Then I spent a few hours over the weekend trying to access overloaded rebate websites, and filling out rebate forms (multiple forms *per item* for those great prices!) We'll see if the rebates come through.

      Getting stuff for the absolute minimum price takes a lot of time and effort. It's not realistic to figure those prices into estimates for anything.

    10. Re:couldn't you just buy by ti.payn · · Score: 1

      I marveled over the price NAS vs. the underlying gigs for a while but after talking to enterprise people it made more sense. When they need to deploy these out fast, it is worth the money. As for building one for 2000 ... yeah, there is a shit load of money in storage solutions right now BUT mostly in the enterprise space. Meaning they only want to deal with DELL, HP, IBM etc. But if you can talk to a local shop that doesn't need national coverage you can set up a custom, inexpensive RAID setup for far, far less than HP/IBM/DELL. It's just not that common that local firms need terabytes and terabytes.

    11. Re:couldn't you just buy by 3terrabyte · · Score: 1
      I did the same but for Office Max's hard drive. I thought it was at location X, which would have been great since it's out of the way. However, that was Office Depot. The Office Max was next to Best BUy. Thus, when I got there at 6 (1 hour early) I just turned around because obviously the runoff from BB went to this line.

      It's ok, I've been watching and getting decent 120GB's all year.

      The rebates work sucks, but all have worked so far. I once had WD send me a post card 4 years ago saying that my zipcode was outside the market they were running the rebate ads at. It was a 30GB hard drive at that time. I took the post card to Circuit City, and they forked over cash to cover THEIR mistake.

      --

      Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?

    12. Re:couldn't you just buy by timts · · Score: 1

      first, there're websites like www.bf2004.net to let us know what to buy before the day,

      second, there are deals year around if you check those deal web sites, some time the price is even cheaper than black friday ones.

      third, when I got bestbuy late, I found a 160G hidden among 250Gs, apparently some one put them there earlier so that they can pick it up that day? never mind, I got it. :D

    13. Re:couldn't you just buy by Forge · · Score: 1

      Relieble power sopply?

      Where I live (Jamaica) a UPS is as popular a periferal as a Printer. Ower power is onreliable inconsistent and flaky.

      Why do I mention this? Because no PSU is relable here. OK. The little addapters that ship with Harmon Kardon speakers are especialy bad :)

      I Have boght ATX casses in that ballpark. Are they top class ? No. But in this business, the crapy stuff retails for well above the manufacturing cost of the good stuff. With PC Power suplies (ATX and AT) There are no royalties to pay and the design sticks around for years. I.e. VERY Low cost to an eficent manufacturer (I.e. Taiwan)

      --
      --= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
  7. And how is this any better than a shuttle? by dgr100 · · Score: 0

    Granted, a shuttle will require you to load an operating system. But if it saves several houndred pounds, I'd take the sacrafice! Especially as it doesn't look like this system allows you set raid-1 the drives.

  8. Hmm by pHatidic · · Score: 2, Funny

    But then where do I put my shoes?

    1. Re:Hmm by Bazman · · Score: 1

      Put your shoes in your computer case...

  9. $2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by stupidfoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hmm... $2900 for 1.6TB of storage? And no ethernet? Why not just build your own NAS unit that has the same amount of storage, includes ethernet, and would cost you about $1200-$1400? You could even put it in a fancy case for that price.

    1. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by Threni · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The amusingly cheap dollar has something to do with this. Perhaps they'll let you pay for it with a currency of some value - Pounds sterling or Iraqi dinars maybe?

    2. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by Ramsey-07 · · Score: 0

      I think it's aimed at people whom like fancy shoe boxes.... Just my guess.

    3. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by Squareball · · Score: 1

      Every time I go to a strip club, I get all my money converted to Iraqi Dinars first. $5 US in Iraqi Dinars gives me TONS of cash to stuff down panties! Of course soon I'll be converting my 5 Euros and getting 100 $1's USD ;)

    4. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by Gyorg_Lavode · · Score: 1

      Pricing a U2/U3 server w/ 4x400 in Raid5 (so really 1.2TB storage) I was seeing prices in the 2000-2500 range. 1200-1400 seems optimistic.

      --
      I do security
    5. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by stupidfoo · · Score: 1

      The HDZ-UE1.6TS doesn't support RAID. It is simply for adding 1.6TB of storage via your USB2 or firewire connection.

      The drive contains four 400GB Maxtor HDDs which are recognised as a single drive. Support interfaces are USB2.0 and IEEE1394.

      Price out a good case with decent mobo/processor/etc and the 4 400GB HDs and you'll be well below the $1500 mark.

    6. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by Gyorg_Lavode · · Score: 1

      4x400GB HD's will run you 1k by themselves minimum. For SATA (which is what I want), they'll run you more. You could get the rest of the computer for 500. (To get reasonable quality and the raid you'll be around 1k though.) And, lets face it, for 1.6TB, unless your using this AS your backup, (ie. the information exists elsewhere), your going to want that much storage in raid.

      --
      I do security
    7. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Get back to mopping my floors, turd-worlder!

    8. Re:$2900 = $1500 for prettiness? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Get back to mopping my floors, turd-worlder!

      I quit! At almost two dollars to the pound, I'm working for the Brits now! Your green paper just isn't worth anything anymore!

  10. you could just get two Lacies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    you could get two(or 3) Lacie 500GB drives for about 400 each.

  11. Sheesh.... by MHleads · · Score: 3, Informative

    Supported operating systems are Windows Me, 2000 and XP.

    It doesn't support any of unices.

    1. Re:Sheesh.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Since it uses SBP/RBC and USB Mass Storage Device class, what makes you think it won't work on Linux?

    2. Re:Sheesh.... by jarich · · Score: 1
      Well of course it doesn't support any of the Unices...

      At 1.6 TB, it's just a home backup solution. I'd never use it at work! :)

    3. Re:Sheesh.... by zenmojodaddy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Is it just me, or is there a tendency to say that hardware supports Windows, but is supported by Linux/Unix? As if the only thing that keeps Windows stumbling onwards is a big pile of hard drives and sound cards propping up its carcass...

    4. Re:Sheesh.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Who would have a use for this type of storage, yet would at the same time run Windows Me?

    5. Re:Sheesh.... by tomstdenis · · Score: 1

      gah?

      You having an afair with a real os?

      Some of us come home to a *bsd/linux distro setup ;-)

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    6. Re:Sheesh.... by jacksonj04 · · Score: 1

      I don't know. A lot of things are "Ready for Windows", maybe they catch it when it falls?

      --
      How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
    7. Re:Sheesh.... by julesh · · Score: 1

      Who would have a use for this type of storage, yet would at the same time run Windows Me?

      Interesting question. What's the limit on the size of a single FAT32 partition? If it's less than 100Gb (?) you won't even be able to use 1.6Tb on a single disk with WinME.

      Although having said that I'm starting to get the feeling that with a large enough cluster size you might be able to use this a single FAT32 partition.

    8. Re:Sheesh.... by ChairmanMeow · · Score: 1

      According to Microsoft, the maximum size that Windows XP allows for a FAT32 partition is 32GB (though the maximum possible is 8TB). My guess would be that Windows ME's limit would be the same or lower.

      --
    9. Re:Sheesh.... by upsidedown_duck · · Score: 1

      Is it just me, or is there a tendency to say that hardware supports Windows, but is supported by Linux/Unix?

      My DSL modem is like this, where it actually has a a full administrative interface at port 80, but the documentation provided absolutely no clue. The only thing that came in the box was a Windows-only install wizard CD-ROM. Once set up from Windows, it plugs into my OpenBSD firewall no questions asked.

      It was quite annoying to have to drag out Windows to later discover Windows wasn't even needed. I dislike my ISP for that, but they are my only choice, right now.

      --
      -- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
    10. Re:Sheesh.... by squall14716 · · Score: 1

      I'm using a 185 GB FAT32 partition for data in Windows XP (SP2) right now.

    11. Re:Sheesh.... by ChairmanMeow · · Score: 1

      Then I guess Microsoft is wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.

      --
    12. Re:Sheesh.... by squall14716 · · Score: 1

      Actually, after reading the page, it says that Windows can only format it up to 32 GB, not that it can't read/write to FAT32 partitions over 32 GB.

      I created my partition with cfdisk and formatted it with mkfs.vfat in Linux.

  12. Supported OS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    The "HDZ-UE1.6TS" will be made to order at a price of 294,000 yen. Supported operating systems are Windows Me, 2000 and XP.

    Me? For that much money? And not OS X?

    1. Re:Supported OS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lots of capable media professionals do good work on OS X. hahaha. Script Kiddie (moron).

  13. Wow by squoozer · · Score: 1, Funny

    And I thought 640Kb was enough!

    --
    I used to have a better sig but it broke.
    1. Re:Wow by BrokenHalo · · Score: 1

      ... and lost in history (or at least my memory) is the name of the IBM executive who claimed that "nobody will ever need a disk drive bigger than 10 megabytes"...

  14. LaCie has 1.6TB external as well by Schweg · · Score: 5, Informative

    LaCie has an external FireWire800/USB2 external drive available for about $1000, see here.

    1. Re:LaCie has 1.6TB external as well by splateagle · · Score: 1

      um, nice but the link you posted lists it as $2199 - which isn't exactly "about $1000" in most people's books.

    2. Re:LaCie has 1.6TB external as well by Schweg · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Yeah, I noticed that, and corrected myself already. Oops.

    3. Re:LaCie has 1.6TB external as well by memco · · Score: 1

      Sure it is, for large values values of 1000.

      --
      Get me a meat pie floater!
    4. Re:LaCie has 1.6TB external as well by ralphus · · Score: 1

      I have the LaCie 1TB drive and it is great! Lacie also makes a 1.6TB but it is about $1800.

      --
      Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
  15. So? by digitalamish · · Score: 2, Insightful

    With the cost of IDE hard drives dropping, you could get 4 300 Gig IDE (or SATA) hard drives, and put them in an external case. I think you could shave a $1000 off that price. Even better would be if it was a network storage device.

    1. Re:So? by Greyfox · · Score: 1
      The lowest price on pricewatch for a 300 gig SATA is $198, so you could shave a lot more than $1000 off that price. They've got 400 gig ones too, but they're $355 right now. You could still slap 4 of them in your system for a lot less than $2900.

      I want to build a MythTV PVR with around 1.6TB of storage sometime next year. That'd also give me a nice centralized location to stash my MP3s and stuff, too.

      --

      I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    2. Re:So? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 1

      Even better would be if it was a network storage device.

      Not unless it has a gigabit port. Firewire 400 has 4x the bitrate, Firewire 800 has 8x the bitrate of ethernet.

    3. Re:So? by jellomizer · · Score: 0

      Well that is what is actually is. 4 400GB Drives in a box. The main advantage is that to the computer (Espctially to a Windows PC) it is reconized as a singal drive. That is where the true advantage is. Expecially for a rapidly growing buisness with windows as their primary platform, It is cheaper to pay the extra $1000 to get this feature then to try to configure windows to run the 4 drives as 1 or rearage all the data so it can fit properly in 4 drives. This is pritty simple with Linux and Other Unix systems. But for windows based of the DOS style drive handling each drive/partition usually has a drive letter asigned to it. VS. Having mounts on a file system in *nix. This the extra $1000 is pritty cheap compared to implemnation time of te 4 drive explaining to a hundred users that the data may be on different Shares, etc... It is just one of those extra TCO price hikes in Windows that microsoft doesn't want to studie and report as part of Windows TCO.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    4. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Being a network storage device doesn't prevent it from also being a Firewire device. Does it?

    5. Re:So? by jarich · · Score: 1
      It is cheaper to pay the extra $1000 to get this feature then to try to configure windows to run the 4 drives as 1 or rearage all the data so it can fit properly in 4 drives. This is pritty simple with Linux and Other Unix systems. But for windows based of the DOS style drive handling each drive/partition usually has a drive letter asigned to it.

      What??

      It will take you 30 seconds in the Windows Disk Manager to merge "dynamic disks" into a "striped volume" (software raid). You can also do this from a command line.

      There are lots of great reasons to use Linux... this is not one of them.

    6. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Give me a break.... with Windows 2000 / XP, this isn't a problem anymore. You can now mount whatever you want whereever you want with Windows too.

    7. Re:So? by Total_Wimp · · Score: 1

      Windows implimentation of DFS lets you mount to any point on the tree, much like NFS. Come to think of it, Window has an implimentation of NFS too.

      Drive letters are not an issue on Windows unless you want them to be.

      TW

    8. Re:So? by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Ok I am wrong sorry. Just Mod my origional message down I haven't used Windows 2000/XP enough to really check those features I was basing it on my NT knowlege. But on an other hand I don't usually work with software RAID enough to really care because I am not a big fan of it anyways, Yes it is cheaper then harware RAID, but you are putting your faith on software running on the same devices that it is soposed to reduntantly protect, so if your drive fails and it is the one that is needed to boot windows then your SOL without a lot of work. While with good hardware RAID will run with the bad drive and automaticlly change without the OS going Poof.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    9. Re:So? by SoTuA · · Score: 1
      no, you can't mount it "wherever you want". You can mount it on an _empty NTFS folder_.

      Good luck trying to empty "C:\documents and settings" and then mounting a different partition there.

    10. Re:So? by afidel · · Score: 1

      Uh, since windows 2000 you can go dynamic group and expand the partition across as many drives as you want, you can also mount a partition as a mount point under an NTFS volume, so for example you could add a drive as a new folder under your existing C drive, this is just as flexible as a unix solution. Oh yeah and you can do software RAID5 if you want if you are running Server.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    11. Re:So? by dAzED1 · · Score: 1

      its not that hard - you simply change where the docs and settings are saved temporarily (like, in "bob" or something), mount, copy from the temp spot, repoint, and boom - done. I mean, I bash windows with the best of them, but they've finally (sortof) got this thing that has been around in unix for a few hundred years.

    12. Re:So? by shades6666 · · Score: 1

      While with good hardware RAID will run with the bad drive and automaticlly change without the OS going Poof

      True, but if your hardware RAID controller goes poof, you could be SOL. The RAID signatures are rarely compatible across different brands of controllers and often not compatible across models of the same brand. I don't know if firmware revisions would affect recoverablility but it not impossible.

      The point is that either way, there is a single point of failure that will involve a lot of work to recover from.

    13. Re:So? by Total_Wimp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ok I am wrong sorry. Just Mod my origional message down I haven't used Windows 2000/XP enough to really check those features I was basing it on my NT knowlege.

      I think this happens a lot. People keep wanting to compare the current features of Unix and/or Linux to the features of NT4.0. They used NT back in the day, it left a bad taste in their mouth, and they moved on to something else. They keep this snapshot picture in their mind of the bad ol' days because they got burned so badly they didn't want to try it again with a more recent version.

      I've seen people do this to Linux too. Linux is not the same OS it was 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago when a lot of people tried it and came to the conclusion that it didn't quite meet their needs. I personally tried Linux about 5 years ago and disliked it for a variety of reasons. But I've been using a few versions recently ranging from 6 months to a year old and almost all of those objections have been fixed.

      Windows Server OSs have grown up a lot since NT 4.0 and and deserves a much better reputation too. Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 are stable and flexible, even if they're still closed and expensive. People who used NT in the past should at least give the new Windows a chance before dismissing it.

      TW

    14. Re:So? by SoTuA · · Score: 1
      it's the "sortof" that I take issue with.

      I mean, it's been done right for so many years, why come off half-baked like that? :)

      (btw, I'll try what you suggested. Thanks!)

    15. Re:So? by geekoid · · Score: 1

      but which has the worse history for having issues, software or hardware?

      I have had a lot more problems with OS's then with RAID controllers.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    16. Re:So? by jandrese · · Score: 1

      For $2900 I think they would be able to afford to put a gigabit port on there. Gig-E cards aren't all that expensive anymore (at least for the copper ones).

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    17. Re:So? by ar32h · · Score: 1

      Hey, even NT4.0 supported disk striping (as well as other types of software RAID.)

    18. Re:So? by shades6666 · · Score: 1

      Failures in RAID controllers are thankfully rare, but they do happen and they're a real pain to recover from. Software RAID is more susceptible to problems, but the data can usually be recovered quite easily by moving the drives to another (working) machine, or by re-installing the OS on a separate drive (not part of the SW RAID array). As with most things, it's a trade-off.

    19. Re:So? by dAzED1 · · Score: 1
      if you have a lot of users already set up on the system, its a bit more complicated...if its just one, its easier. I have done it before myself though on a system with 5 users set up - if it can be done for 5, it can be done for 500.

      It involved editing the registry, and wasn't fast by any means, but...it is possible.

    20. Re:So? by SoTuA · · Score: 1
      It involved editing the registry, and wasn't fast by any means, but...it is possible.

      Got any handy links? I'd sure appreciate the help... it's my first windows install that lived more than a year :D

    21. Re:So? by upsidedown_duck · · Score: 1

      Windows Server OSs have grown up a lot since NT 4.0 and and deserves a much better reputation too.

      Are you sure about this? Windows XP is no gem (it took til SP2 to get a default firewall and the most basic stack-attack protection), and I remember fightng tooth-and-nail to get stuff like network printers configured under Win 2000. The user interfaces were redundant and inconsistent and the documentation sucked old haggy ass. MS Word also had no problems locking Win 2000 up so hard a power cycle was required.

      Windows always reminds me of the axiom: the more things change, the more that remains the same.

      --
      -- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
    22. Re:So? by jargoone · · Score: 1

      Windows XP is no gem
      ...
      MS Word also had no problems locking Win 2000

      What part of the words Windows Server OSs did you miss in the post you replied to?

      Windows XP is NOT a server OS. Windows Server 2003 is.

      Windows 2000 Professional (the one you're probably talking about) is NOT a server OS.

      You've had problems with the desktop versions. You don't even know about the server versions, so you certainly have never seen or used them.

    23. Re:So? by dAzED1 · · Score: 1

      ah, sorry...no. If I had a windows box in the house still, I'd just find it and tell you the location in the registry. Sorry :/

  16. If it's 1.6TB... by Slayback · · Score: 5, Informative

    Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?

    1. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by White+Roses · · Score: 0

      Formatted vs. unformatted? It's like an old floppy!

      --
      Do not touch -Willie
    2. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by oexeo · · Score: 2, Funny

      > Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?

      You missed the sub-text: "0.4TB of complimentary porn included"

    3. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Slayback · · Score: 1

      I can buy in a RAID 5 configuration you'd lose about 1 disk, versus just RAID 0 and just a sum. But losing 400GB to formatting is nothing to dismiss. This is especially confusing since there is even 1.6 in the freakin' model number!

    4. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by golden_spray · · Score: 1, Informative

      Its probably 1.6 terabytes which is approximately 1.2 Tebibytes

      Of course, the conversions don't work out quite right, so I think there is probably some "rounding" going on

    5. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Woogiemonger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?

      I'm sure you already knew this, but obviously they figured it looks the same as an older model of the same line, seen here: http://www.iodata.jp/news/2004/12/hdz-ue.htm You can also see how much you save by going for four 300MB drives (over $600 saved), or four 250MB drives (nearly $1900 saved) on that page.

    6. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I think you mean "Teddybytes."

      One Teddybyte is 1,024 Moobybytes or 1,048,576 Kibblebytes.

      In the opposite direction, 1,024 Teddybytes comprise one Paedobyte.

    7. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?

      Because they also sell 1.2TB and 1.0TB models. Look at the Japanese link.

    8. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by spudchucker · · Score: 0

      metric

    9. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Tebibytes"? That has got to be the stupidest sounding word I've heard in years. It'll be a cold day in hell before I use that fucking terminology.

    10. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by meatspray · · Score: 2, Funny

      Those were canadian TB's.....

      umm yeah...

    11. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 1

      You can also see how much you save by going for four 300MB drives (over $600 saved), or four 250MB drives (nearly $1900 saved) on that page.

      Screw all that - for that amount of storage, I'd require a raid setup. Wouldn't it suck to lose over 1TB of whatever it is you're putting in there?

      --
      "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
    12. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by mikael · · Score: 1

      200 Gigabytes are for the online instruction videos. The other 200 Gigabytes are the promotional trailers required by the movie industry as compensation for piracy.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    13. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by DigitumDei · · Score: 1

      OMW.

      I thought this was a joke. Googling for it however returns far to many positives.

      I suppose it makes sense since the standard SI prefixes (kilo-,mega-,giga-,tera-) are all powers of 10 (3,6,9,12 respectively) rather than 2.

      But, kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi. Sounds like teletubbies came up with it.

    14. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because those are Japanese terabytes. Something happened over the Pacific Ocean, during the conversion from Japanese terabytes to Japanese Libararies of Congress to American Libraries of Congress and back to American terabytes. It's all very confusing.

    15. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, you must be outside the U.S., then. Here in the U.S. we're stuck with Tebibytes, Pebibytes, and all the other English units. The sad thing is, the English long ago switched to the metric units (terabytes, petabytes) that the rest of the world uses.

    16. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by afroborg · · Score: 1

      It is a joke. I don't care if these people are serious, those prefixes are not acutaully used by anyone with a brain.

      The idea is to stop thick people from arguing about whether 1kb is 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes. Whenever the argument comes up someone always brings up "kibi-bytes" and "monkey-bytes" and "googoo-bytes" or whatever the hell this crap is.

      It's not that hard people. Marketoids use SI units because you can quote higher numbers. Programmers use powers of 2 because it makes the maths work.

      People should leave things alone that they are too ignorant to understand and let the rest of us get on with it.

      --
      my sig could kick your sig's arse...
    17. Re:If it's 1.6TB... by magefile · · Score: 1

      So buy two (if you can afford one, consider the other one "insurance") and set up software RAID.

  17. LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme by luiss · · Score: 4, Informative

    Only $2199. Been available for a while now, there's probably a Slashdot story about it too.
    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1

    1. Re:LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme by DLG · · Score: 4, Interesting

      We are using the 1TB variety as an experiment in harddrive back ups. We ship the drives offsite. The cost is not that much larger than our tape budget and we are able to back and restore more quickly.

      They are firewire 800 so they go pretty fast.

  18. cool by AlanS2002 · · Score: 0

    all we need now is some sort of interface with our feet.

    --
    Not all conservatives are stupid,
    but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
    - Hume
  19. 4 drives? by Woogiemonger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The device is basically an external hardware RAID implementation. I'm just wondering what they do to help the reliability of the data. I also wonder if you can choose to change the RAID configuration of the device. For people that don't care too much about the preservation of data, 4 drives running in parallel, at 4 times the speed would be kinda neat :)

    1. Re:4 drives? by FluffyPanda · · Score: 1

      Except that it's a USB / Firewire device and as such won't be able to transfer more than 480 / 400 Mbps.

      I'll stick with standard RAID in a fileserver box with gigabit ethernet for my external storage needs thank you very much. Upgradeable, and at a much lower price.

    2. Re:4 drives? by theparanoidcynic · · Score: 1

      Yes, but it would choke at the interface. Firewire and USB2 both have kinda limited transfer rates as far as drive thruput goes.

      --
      Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
    3. Re:4 drives? by Matey-O · · Score: 1
      For people that don't care too much about the preservation of data, 4 drives running in parallel, at 4 times the speed would be kinda neat :)

      And four times the chance of hardware failure!
      --
      "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
    4. Re:4 drives? by afidel · · Score: 1

      Yes, but Firewire2 is 80MB/s, which is more than twice as fast as any tape drive out there and just as fast as the U2W interface on most libraries. Sure a super expensive Fiberchannel library will be faster, but it will also cost orders of magnitude more.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    5. Re:4 drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've used an external fw2 device before. For large files the speed is pretty good at roughly 30MB/sec. For transfering thousands and thousands of small files (10-50KB each) , we were getting roughly 1-2 MB/sec from the device. It took almost 18 hours to copy 700GB of small files.

  20. Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
  21. Boatload? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not much larger than four 3.5" hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space.

    Stupid metric system... what's the conversion rate from boatloads to Libraries of Congress?

    1. Re:Boatload? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
      A Library of Congress (print media collection) is approximately 208TB.

      Given 1.6TB is a boatload, the conversion rate works out to 1 Library of Congress for every 130 boatloads.

    2. Re:Boatload? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1 boatload = 1/16th of a LOC

    3. Re:Boatload? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And let us not forget that a boatload is smaller than a shipload. Shiploads are in turn smaller than sh*tloads.

    4. Re:Boatload? by noidentity · · Score: 1

      Stupid metric system... what's the conversion rate from boatloads to Libraries of Congress?

      Apparently one boatload = one shoebox, so it's probably not many libraries of congress.

    5. Re:Boatload? by rzebram · · Score: 1

      1 Boatload = 164,003 Volkswagons = 1/3rd Libraries of Congress. Per shoebox.

  22. Big deal by MasTRE · · Score: 1

    You can do that with 4x400GB Maxtors, which are not larger than four 3.5" hard drives ;) SO what's the big deal here? And you don't have to spend $2900 to do so (although, to hook them all up and leave some space for some CD drives, etc., you may want to get a couple of dedicated PCI EIDE/SATA controllers). Not a big deal, no innovation here, move along.

    --
    Must-not-watch TV!
    1. Re:Big deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Five. Five 400G maxtors, you need one extra for RAID 5.

  23. CORRECTION by Schweg · · Score: 5, Informative

    LaCie's 1.6TB drive lists for $2199, their older 1TB drive is $999.

    1. Re:CORRECTION by MrPerfekt · · Score: 1

      And a good deal if you ask me...

      All the people on here saying "I can build the same thing for millions less..." aren't taking into consideration that these drives (LaCie's product anyway) are not your typical off-the-shelf drive slapped into an external carrier.

      With Firewire 800, the (claimed) transfer specs are significantly higher than with a homebrew drive-and-case scenario. Coupled with the fact that they're offering 500GB drives in the same form factor, makes a pretty compelling product especially at $450 for 500GB. Of course they also have the bigger drives with bigger form factors at 1TB and 1.6TB.

      In any case, while I've never owned one of their drives, I am interested in purchasing a couple of theirs for my next RAID project.

      --
      I just wasted your mod points! HA!
  24. 1.6TB In a Shoebox, If You've Got the Money by Jumbo+Jimbo · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'd rather have the $2,900 in a shoebox, thanks

  25. not news by jridley · · Score: 1

    LaCie has a 1tb unit based on 4x 250GB drives, and it acts just like a normal firewire hard drive, so it's compatible with anything. I'm sure they'll have a 1.6TB version if they don't already; they just need to drop in 4x seagate 400GB drives instead and they're done.

    They may already have this, but their site is nearly unusable right now for me.

    1. Re:not news by jridley · · Score: 1

      Yup, LaCie did it months ago.
      http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C30 13/

  26. You Could Also Buy... by RemusX2 · · Score: 1

    6 of these http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?desc ription=22-144-359&depa=1 300 GB Hardrives and chain them together... cutting the costs down more then half.

  27. just dont put it near anything magnetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    1.6tb is hell of a lot of data to lose

  28. You young wimpy whippersnappers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    $2900 for 1.6 TB!?! And you're complaining!?! Bah!

    I remember paying $2000 for a 100 MB SCSI disk when they first came out. And this was before that new-fangled internet thingy came out; so we didn't have on-line porn to fill up our disks with! No, siree. Back then, we had to fill up our hard disks with actual source code!

    Oh, where or where have all the real hackers gone, these days?

    1. Re:You young wimpy whippersnappers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      100 MB? Loooookshury!
      I remember drooling over 20MB harddrive + 14MHz 68010 turboboard + 8MB RAM "sidecar" expansions for my Amiga 500. $2000 sounds familiar.

    2. Re:You young wimpy whippersnappers! by Ramsey-07 · · Score: 0

      Grandpa!!! :))))) WTF are you doing on /.!?

    3. Re:You young wimpy whippersnappers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about an Apple ProFile (5MB) for $3499 (ca. 1981)? I owned one these for a while (bought it used for *considerably* less that $3499).....

      http://oldcomputers.net/lisa.html

    4. Re:You young wimpy whippersnappers! by isorox · · Score: 1

      I remember paying $2000 for a 100 MB SCSI disk when they first came out. And this was before that new-fangled internet thingy came out; so we didn't have on-line porn to fill up our disks with! No, siree. Back then, we had to fill up our hard disks with actual source code!

      And we had to write the source code with 3 toggle switches on the front of the machine, and we had to walk through the snow to get to it, uphill. both ways.

      AND WE FSCKING LIKED IT!!

  29. or... by IceFox · · Score: 1

    Simply get four hitachi 400GB drives ~$350 acording to pricewatch and at half the cost $1400 you can easily afford just about any basic computer to put them in with the left over money.

    Or

    Get 300GB drives for about ~$200 and for $2000 you can have 5 live drives and 5 backup, combine for 3TB or use your favorite raid setup and you still have $1000 left over for a box to hold the drives.

    Best of all with either of these options you can put in the system a real uplink. Skip the firewire/usb and go straight for gigabit or optical.

    -Benjamin Meyer

    --
    Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
  30. How about... by sammykrupa · · Score: 1

    1 Apple Xserve Raids?

    1. Re:How about... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I prefer my storage units without any homosexual unnecessary hardware attached to them, thank you.

  31. Who needs it? I'll get one from China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Here's the Japanese press release." (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)

    Hahah who needs a hard drive? I don't have hard drives. i just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers. It's a lot cheaper.

  32. How Much is Enough? by pipingguy · · Score: 0


    Unless you're archiving video or 10,000 of your favourite tunes, this is way overkill. Most people with 40GB hard drives never fill them.

    Let the replies referring to Bill Gates' statement about "enough for everyone" and slashdot's SIG comment restrictions begin.

    1. Re:How Much is Enough? by vidarh · · Score: 4, Informative
      I've got about 300 DVD's, and I want them available on demand and there's no way I'm going to reencode anything in MPEG4. Filling 1.6TB is easy :) Add my almost-there MythTV setup and storage needs rapidly increase.

      Archiving video is becoming a mainstream activity these days :-)

    2. Re:How Much is Enough? by lucabrasi999 · · Score: 1
      I want them available on demand

      But aren't they already available "on demand"? One day, you say to yourself, "Hey, I want to watch Used Cars again! I have only seen it fifteen times!" You simply walk over to the DVD case, pull out the movie you want to see, and plop it into the DVD player. Voila, it's playing on your TV!.

      Or, have we all reached the point where actually standing up and walking over to the DVD case is just too much work?

    3. Re:How Much is Enough? by rthille · · Score: 1

      Just putting all my CDs online with lossless encoding was about 130GB. I'm not even thinking about doing our DVDs until storage comes down by about a factor of 10. It's not just about having the CDs online, because I also like to have a backup of any data I've got online. Sure, I could store my CDs offsite, but that involves storing a big box in a storage area or at a family/friend's house. I do that with tapes, because they're small, but a big box is different.

      --
      Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
    4. Re:How Much is Enough? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

      Check out the free hard drive vs hard drive size parts of the survey. Granted, these people are gamers, and mostly have broadband, but it shows that at least a large minority of users a) have more than 40 gigs of space and b) use most of it.

      I have almost 10 gigs of ut2004 alone...

    5. Re:How Much is Enough? by CrackedButter · · Score: 1

      Yes we have reached that point...

    6. Re:How Much is Enough? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Archiving video is becoming a mainstream activity these days"

      That's a joke.... False Consensus Effect: People readily guess their own opinions as being more prevalent in the general public than they really are.

    7. Re:How Much is Enough? by Eccles · · Score: 1

      But aren't they already available "on demand"?

      Yes, my kids demand that I put the disk in...

      --
      Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
    8. Re:How Much is Enough? by ...+James+... · · Score: 2, Informative

      I wanted that too. Instead I have a pair of Sony DVP-CX777ES 400 disc DVD changers hooked up to an Escient DVDM-100 media manager. I just pick the DVD I want and it does the rest (even downloads cover art and movie info from Escient). $1700 for the manager, $500 for each changer (up to 3). You can have 1200 DVDs on demand for $3200. Probably the second best purchase I've made for my theater, next to my projector/screen.

      James

    9. Re:How Much is Enough? by PW2 · · Score: 1

      Add a field to a DVD Profiler database which would allow in home guests to search your DB, find the movie, then just click "play" instead of trying to find it on a shelf somewhere. (300-500 DVD boxes does add up to a lot of wall space)

    10. Re:How Much is Enough? by lucabrasi999 · · Score: 1
      Add a field to a DVD Profiler database which would allow in home guests to search your DB, find the movie, then just click "play" instead of trying to find it on a shelf somewhere.

      It sounds cool, but by transfering all of your movies to hard drive, aren't you going "backwards" with your storage technology? At every client I have ever worked at, they take a nightly backup of all their hard drives. They store those nightly backups locally for a few days. After those few days are up, they transfer those backups to some other media (disk, tape, etc.) and ship those backups to another location for safe keeping.

      Why do my clients do this? Because they know that most of the data that they have stored is not useful after a few days. And, they know that the other media is generally safer than a hard-drive. They keep the long term storage off-site for DR purposes, or if there is a sudden need to look at some nightly backup from 18 months previous.

      What you appear to be saying here is that you are willing to take up a full Terabyte of storage space in order to keep 300 to 500 movies for the occasional usage of a home "guest". I do not see the overall benefits for three main reasons:

      The hard drive is not nearly as safe or reliable as keeping the movie stored on the DVD itself

      I don't see the cost-benefit of having a home movie DB for 300 movies when there are only 365 days in the year. Given the number of new movies that come out on DVD each week, you will probably never be able to watch your entire database.

      Finally, most homeowners are already paying for homeowners insurance. I have all of my music Compact Discs identified for my insurer. If I owned 400 movies, I would identify them, as well. There is no need for backup, because I am paying insurance to protect my investment.

      Now, I have to admit, the choice to put all of your movies on a nicely indexed hard-drive is entirely up to you. Your reasons for doing so are probably justifiable from your point of view. If you have the money, the time and the desire to do this, then I say "Go for it." I just do not understand your reasoning, and I probably never will.

    11. Re:How Much is Enough? by sootman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So, I take it you haven't ripped any of your CDs to MP3/AAC/WMA/ogg/etc.? 'Cause, you know, it's just so easy to walk over to your wall, pull down a CD, pop it in your player... :-)

      Even if I *weren't* so totally lazy, I'd *still* want to rip all my DVDs. First of all, as a TiVo owner, I *totally love* the whole "press a button and see a list of everything I have" thing.

      Secondly, I hate media. That is, little plastic and metal things I have to move around. (Furethermore: I could care less about CD liner notes, and every DVD box is the same--picture of the actor on the front, and a back panel listing all the special DVD features like... interactive menus, and subtitles! ooh... But anyway,)

      I hate taking out these fragile things and moving them into and out of the player (and then the bonus: that I *have to* sit through the bullshit red warnings in nine languages, and the 30-minute intro montage just to get to the fscking menus.) If I scratch one while taking it out of its shitty case (I never thought they'd find worse packaging than plain-old jewel cases, but here we are--press the center button, bend your DVD backwards, and hope it doesn't get scratched when it *finally* springs out of the vise-like holder) then yippee, I get to pay for it again!

      I'd much rather have it all on HDs. I shouldn't touch anything but buttons. Plus, once it's all, y'know, *computerized*, you get all kinds of neat bonuses, like "Show me all the Harrison Ford movies I have" or "what comedies have I not watched in the last six months" and things like that.

      And the randomness is a bonus. Sometimes I can't really think of what I'd like to watch, and I've even had this happen: I'll be flipping around HBO or Showtime, see a move on *that I own*, and I'll leave it on, just because it's already on and it's as good of a choice as I could have made on my own. So a "random play", just like all CD and MP3 players have, would be cool, too. Especially if my Humongo Media Server has shows as well as movies--maybe Used Cars, maybe The Simpsons, maybe Terminator 2, maybe Seinfeld, maybe Law and Order... just the thing to have on for a long Saturday of room-cleaning and slashdot-reading.

      --
      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    12. Re:How Much is Enough? by HarvardAce · · Score: 1
      Probably the second best purchase I've made for my theater, next to my projector/screen.

      So are the DVD's that you use to actually utilize your theater not very important, or did you not purchase them? If you ask me, all that theater setup is pretty useless if you have nothing to play.

      --
      Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
    13. Re:How Much is Enough? by really? · · Score: 1

      My "TV" is in my bedroom. My folks like to watch stuff on the livingroom TV, and sometimes, especially in summer, on the TV in the basement - it's cooler there.
      You can see how having all the DVDs, AVIs, etc in one place that is accesible from everywhere is convenient. No?

      --

      "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
    14. Re:How Much is Enough? by lucabrasi999 · · Score: 1
      So, I take it you haven't ripped any of your CDs to MP3/AAC/WMA/ogg/etc.? 'Cause, you know, it's just so easy to walk over to your wall, pull down a CD, pop it in your player... :-)

      Nah, it's way too much of a hassle. I travel away from my home four days a week. When I am home, the last thing I want to do is spend time f**king around with a computer. And, yeah, those warnings are annoying, but, other than for Disney movies, I usually only have to put up with two or three previews (Disney tends to give you about five or six).

      as a TiVo owner

      I am an owner, too. I like the idea of flipping through shows on a viewer. However, there are only a few shows I want the thing to record. I have to admit, once TiVo starts giving us pop-up commercials in 2005, I will probably consider other forms of DVR technology, but then only to record individual TV shows.

      I hate taking out these fragile things and moving them into and out of the player

      Well, then get one of those CD "Books" (with flippable plasic see-through slots). They hold hundreds of Music or Movie disks. Or, you could do this

      . "Show me all the Harrison Ford movies I have" or "what comedies have I not watched in the last six months"

      OK. That definitely shows a difference in lifestyle here. There is no way you could pay me enough money to sit through another Harrison Ford movie. His acting is so wooden, he makes Keanu Reeves look talented. :) Seriously, I simply do not have the time to watch hundreds of movies. I am away from home four days a week. When I am home, I'd rather play with my kid and/or hang out with my wife and a bottle of wine. Sometimes, that does involve a movie. Other times, that involves taking the kid somewhere. Just a difference in lifestyle.

      When the kid reaches his teenage years in about 12 years or so, I may end up buying some sort of media center, because by then, he won't want to hang out with me. But, in the meantime, I'm not spending the money.

    15. Re:How Much is Enough? by lucabrasi999 · · Score: 1
      You can see how having all the DVDs, AVIs, etc in one place that is accesible from everywhere is convenient.

      Oh, I can see the convenience. I just don't think it's worth the money. I guess that it would take you all of five or ten minutes to get out of bed and walk downstairs to pick a movie to watch. That ten minutes of time is not worth the costs of buying, installing, configuring and maintaining a media storage center.

    16. Re:How Much is Enough? by Nept · · Score: 1

      You can have 1200 DVDs on demand for $3200

      You forgot the price of 1200 DVDs. Tack on another $24,000.

      --
      "Teachers leave us kids alone ..." - Roger Waters, Pink Floyd
    17. Re:How Much is Enough? by PW2 · · Score: 1

      I agree; it's not worth the money;

      Not yet, but...

      There may be a time in the not to distant future when 5TB HDs will be available from Best Buy for $100. In that case, it would be cheap to have the DVD database backed up a few times. (I would backup DVDs in this direction (DVD to HD) since there is no proof of how long DVDs last and certain movies are known for being poorly manufactured and lasting only a couple of years) -- cable TV charges are also getting very expensive which can make personal movie libraries seem cost effective.

    18. Re:How Much is Enough? by really? · · Score: 1

      Well, cost is a matter of perspective.
      The five minutes might well not be a big problem for me, but, my almost 70 year old father with a heart condition is less than enthusiastic about going down into the basement and then back up to his room every time he wants to watch some DVDs.(No, there would be no better place to store several hundred DVDs in their boxes.)

      --

      "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
    19. Re:How Much is Enough? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ok, that's fine, but what if you have a lot of DVDs?

    20. Re:How Much is Enough? by vidarh · · Score: 1
      Once you start getting up in the several hundreds range it starts to get tedious to browse through them and pick the right disk. And besides, I have no desire to have 300+ DVD's (and growing rapidly) filling up my living room if I can put it all together with a file server in a cupboard somewhere.

      It's not that it's "too much work" in the sense that it's tiresome, but frankly I'd much rather spend that time watching a good movie than trying to find that one particular DVD I wanted.

    21. Re:How Much is Enough? by vidarh · · Score: 1

      If you see the convenience, then the rest is really a matter of a combination of how valuable your free time is to you and how much money you have. For some of us, that makes a media storage center worthwhile at current, for some it doesn't. I consider my spare time very valuable - I don't have much, and hence I'm willing to pay rather steep prices to get the convenience.

  33. that's almost enough space... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    to hold all of Bill Gates' 4 million spam-emails/day.

  34. You were lucky! by kriegsman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You were lucky to have a lake! There were one point six billion of us living in a shoebox in the middle o' road!

    -Mark

  35. Which is how much space? by Freexe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can someone convert it to Libraries of Congress, I cant work in Terabytes.

    --
    "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
    1. Re:Which is how much space? by theparanoidcynic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You want "real world" units?

      700 kbps video + 128 kbps audio * 2 channels = 410 MB per hour.

      1.6 (marketing) terabytes / 410 MB = 3900 hours of divx porn.

      "Real world" enough for you? :)

      --
      Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
    2. Re:Which is how much space? by thisissilly · · Score: 3, Funny
      3900 hours of divx porn.

      That's only 13hrs/day, 6 days a week, for 1 year (with two weeks' vacation, of course). Well within the capabilities of your average 15 year old male.

    3. Re:Which is how much space? by madprof · · Score: 2, Funny

      In a year or two we'll see double the capacity of drives so even frenetic rabbit-like young men can find themselves sated.
      I am not sure that they will be able to download that much data or afford those many DVDs to fill it all though....perhaps they should bundle a cable modem/ADSL upgrade with it? ;)

    4. Re:Which is how much space? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm pretty sure the average 15 year old male can only watch in 30 second increments. Let's assume he watches an extra 30 seconds before he manages to click the Stop button and was able to do this two dozen times a day, you're still looking at 26 years and 253 days of non-repeating porn.

    5. Re:Which is how much space? by gstoddart · · Score: 1
      3900 hours of divx porn.

      That's only 13hrs/day, 6 days a week, for 1 year (with two weeks' vacation, of course). Well within the capabilities of your average 15 year old male.


      You're forgetting recuperation/recharge time as well as that after the first three days you'll possibly need a skin graft.

      I think even the average 15 year old male can't maintain, ahem, that kind of dedication in the long run. Even for pr0n.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    6. Re:Which is how much space? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No no no. You can't easily edit a divx file, and when divx is no longer the fancy pants codec du jour you'll want to transcode to something else and lose alot of quality in the process. Better to start high quality, do frame-by-frame editing in kino, and then worry about transcoding to DVD, divx, H.264, or some other codec du jour.

      For those of us with higher quality DV files, 18 GB is 1 80 min tape. That's only 88 tapes you can fit on this box. A friend and I can already fill over half of that right now. And with analog-to-DV passthrough that means I can convert my VHS collection to DV as well. No way it would fit on the remaining 800 GB.

      Similarly, raw ATSC at peak bitrate is under 20 mbit/sec. Under 180 hours per 1.6 TB. That's nothing compared to the number of hours I have on VHS. So if history is any indication, 1 TB will one day be perceived as small as 1 GB is today.

      In fact, given that an OS install now occupies almost a whole gig history indicates one day gnome will take almost a TB. :-p

    7. Re:Which is how much space? by smithmc · · Score: 1

      1.6 (marketing) terabytes / 410 MB = 3900 hours of divx porn.

      How many Libraries of Congress full of porn is that?

      --
      Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
    8. Re:Which is how much space? by MegaHyster · · Score: 1
      The awesome part about this is---------- +5, Insightful

      Not +5, Funny

      --
      All good things...
  36. Storage History by TJ_Phazerhacki · · Score: 2
    My dad (Comp Tech for the USPS) talks about storage at his old college - they were one of the best systems in the state at the time, with a whopping 1.5 MEGABYTE storage. Give it a year or two - first comes the commercial application, then the compu-phile edition, then every Gateway and Dell is shipping with a TB Drive standard.

    The Law of steadily increased storage, much like moore's law, never ceases to amaze.

    --
    Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
    1. Re:Storage History by 87C751 · · Score: 1
      Yeah, I remember the news admin at umn.edu back in 1991 bragging up his new 1GB drive. "This will let us do 7-day retention on all the news groups and 3 days on binaries."

      Life does go on, doesn't it?

      --
      Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
    2. Re:Storage History by julesh · · Score: 1

      Increasing storage size is always driven by new applications, though. First it was a few tiny little GIF porn files, then JPEG porn, then it was low quality 30 second MPEG porn, then medium quality 30 minute MPEG porn, these days it's DVD quality 80-90 minute MPEG porn. OK, so there's HD-DVD, but, really, once that's gone, who'se going to need a bigger disk for their porn collection?

  37. Value? by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 1

    I fail to see why this is so special. Aside from the "shoebox form factor" this isn't anything one could not accomplish simply by buying a bunch of 250GB SATA drives, and a nice 6 or 8 port SATA controller.

    They may not be all that common anymore, but full-size tower cases still exist, and they exist for just this kind of reason.

    --
    Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
  38. Is this a big deal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    400G drives are readily available.

    So to get 1.6T, you hook up 4, put a controller in to RAID them, and there you go.

    Am I missing something?

    I certainly don't see $3K worth of parts, but maybe these are handcrafted by Geisha and dipped in sake?

  39. (Er.. trillion) by kriegsman · · Score: 1

    Y'know, it would have been funnier if I'd gotten the units right the first time.

    -Mark, pre-coffee

  40. How to... by Gadzinka · · Score: 0

    1. Take four 400GB disks
    2. Put them in some kind of SFF case with slow and cheap computer running Linux.
    3. Add >100% markup
    4. Profit!

    --
    Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
  41. Re:Who needs it? I'll get one from China by oexeo · · Score: 1

    > i just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers.

    This isn't the sort of thing you're supposed to tell people!

  42. Huge cost decrease by Ruzty · · Score: 2

    Now, granted we did this with EMC storage which has caching SCSI controllers and ports for fibre attachment, but...

    About 4 years ago my former* employer bought about 1.5 terabytes in an EMC cabinet for about $3,600,000.00. It was a cabinet of 18Gig 10K rpm drives. Yes, they paid a steep markup, but it's still insane compared to the equivalent quality gear available at over a 100 fold decrease in price. Going cheap, like the device in the article or a LaCie bigdisk, would be about a 1,000 fold decrease.

    * They blew through $80 million in VC money in under 3 years. About 10% of that went to EMC for gear that never saw a bit of data stored on it or routed through it. I'll never work for another startup again...

    --
    The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
    1. Re:Huge cost decrease by silas_moeckel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Funny worked at a startup 4 years ago and EMC tried to get my fired for not buying there 3.6 Mill 1.5 TB POS. Then the sales guy went to the I'm going to loose my job if you dont buy it. They also took the your just not testing it correctly stance (was testing through through a server to a load farm with copies of real world work)

      Never ever buy something from EMC they fired there engineers years ago it;s a sales and marketing company. That and the fact they trust embeded windows to run the clarion line :)

      We did 68 Mill in VC in about 2.

      --
      No sir I dont like it.
    2. Re:Huge cost decrease by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So how was Liquid Audio?

    3. Re:Huge cost decrease by shess · · Score: 1

      > We did 68 Mill in VC in about 2.

      And, from your tone, you think this is a good thing?

    4. Re:Huge cost decrease by diamondsw · · Score: 1

      Of course, EMC tecnhology is completely different. You're talking SCSI instead of IDE, fibre channel capability, redundant power, controllers, cooling, SAN backplanes, etc. This Japanese thing is four IDE drives in a box. Enterprises require 24/7, which you aren't getting in a shoebox.

      And as many others have mentioned, there are domestic alternatives for less. Probably better built (La Cie does their own excellent cases with much better cooling than off-the-shelf cases), cheaper, and (as no one else noted), FireWire 800 - something you'll want for such a large drive.

      --
      I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
    5. Re:Huge cost decrease by Ruzty · · Score: 1

      Nope, the company was called Telenisus. They were a "Managed Services Provider" trying to push HA with good security. They overcommitted heavily on hardware, bandwidth and cage space without any customers to use it. The few who bought in were easily paying 9 grand a month or more for what can be had for about $900 a month elsewhere without the multi-layer firewall, SAN storage and IDS stuff they had. The market space was WAY smaller than they thought it was.

      Verisign bought their managed firewall and managed RSA token business. The rest got sold super cheap as recovered hardware or to a lower costing hosting provider.

      They were run into the ground by a former Ameritech Advanced Data Services exec. Big suprise, eh?

      -Rusty

      --
      The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
    6. Re:Huge cost decrease by Ruzty · · Score: 1

      I thought I covered the differences and wasn't trying to state equivalency. But, as no such animal really existed back then and EMC JBOD was about as close as it gets, I figured showing the dramatic shift was a good point.

      -Rusty

      --
      The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
  43. Like the coyote finaly getting the Road Runner... by SWTP_OS9 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Like the coyote. You finaly obtain it.

    But then have that sick realization of "How are you going to back up this bad boy?"

  44. loads of cash needlessly by l3v1 · · Score: 1

    Okay, so two of them to have 1.6T in mirror (not much else to do with this for data protection I guess, it beeing seen as 1 large HDD) would be ~$6000.

    Ummkey. So 8 pieces of Seagate 400gb would be around $3000-3500 and I Raid them anyway I wish.

    Crap for gold, that's what this is.

    --
    I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
  45. So is this really a deal? by Matey-O · · Score: 1

    Black Friday, CompUSA had 400 Gb drives for $290 after rebates. That's about $900. So is an external case worth an additional _2_grand?

    --
    "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
    1. Re:So is this really a deal? by Killjoy_NL · · Score: 1

      That's still $1160, but your point is valid.
      Throw in $100 for a custom case, $50 for the electronics and you have the same for $1310.

      --
      This is the sig that says NI (again)
    2. Re:So is this really a deal? by Matey-O · · Score: 1

      I was assuming it was really a 1.2 Tb box, not a 1.6Tb as the article stated.

      --
      "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
    3. Re:So is this really a deal? by Killjoy_NL · · Score: 1

      I thought something like that :)

      --
      This is the sig that says NI (again)
  46. Make Linux machine into an external disk? by luiss · · Score: 1

    I have not had the time to investigate this, but for the longest time I have wanted to be able to make a linux machine look like an external FireWire/IEEE 1394 hard disk.
    The point of this would be that I could put all the drives I want in a cheap case, with a cheap mobo and ieee 1394 card and 'serve' as many HD's as I could fit into my case and configure into a raid array as a large disk. RAID 1 and/or 5 drive enclosures that accomplish this seem to run at over $1200, not including the disks.
    I've poked around a bit at the Linux1394 site, but It's way over my head at the moment.

    1. Re:Make Linux machine into an external disk? by TheLink · · Score: 1

      Why don't you just make it a fileserver?

      If you are getting a cheap mobo, you'd be limited by PCI bandwidth anyway, unless you're serving stuff from RAM.

      --
    2. Re:Make Linux machine into an external disk? by tchuladdiass · · Score: 1

      One thing you can do is go the SAN solution, using iSCSI. Basically, you set up an iSCSI "target" on your server, and start up the iSCSI "initiator" on each of your clients. Now, you can allocate a chunk of disk space to any of your client boxes on-the-fly, and they see each chunk as if you added a new external drive.
      Do this with gig ethernet, and you have a relatively cheap EMC style solution for home. There's free iSCSI initiators for both Linux and Windows.

  47. At last some competition... by CPM+User · · Score: 4, Funny

    for /dev/null ...

  48. TSS by MeatBlast · · Score: 1

    The screen savers reviewed a bunch of external harddrives a few weeks back and they showed one with 80GB of storage for around 200 bucks (and it wasn't huge). I can't find the link right now but it should be somewhere on their site. Click Here

    1. Re:TSS by MeatBlast · · Score: 1

      Here's the home page of the 60GB (not 80GB) one. Click Here

  49. Another alternative by portwojc · · Score: 1

    The Kuro box is pretty slick. A version of the Buffalo technology linkstation.

    http://www.revogear.com/

    It holds one drive and you can add an additional drive through a USB connection. You add your own drives to boot and it's not at a bad price.

  50. Re:Who needs it? I'll get one from China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh get off your high horse and laugh a little. When you're done, buy a dictionary so you can learn to spell 'cotton' properly.

  51. Lacie - Big disk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Lacie (lacie.com) has a 1.6TB offering as well.

    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10 55 1

  52. Re:Like the coyote finaly getting the Road Runner. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    buy two

  53. $2900 aint what it used to be by museumpeace · · Score: 1

    but being the first kid on the block to have this hot-rod of a storage solution is worth it to some. I remember paying that kind of money in 1984 dollars for a Mac Classic with 20 Mb of HD and 1Mb of memory...its all relative

    --
    SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
  54. Current exchange rates by kaleco · · Score: 1

    "(At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)" ...or £495 :P

    --
    Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
  55. cheap stuff by Sai+Babu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    160gig maxtor have been as low as $30/each (closer to $37 incl tax) after rebate. For about $1500-$1600 total you can put 20 of them together in 3 sets of 5 plus 5 spares and have 1.9TB of RAID. Yes, it costs more for power. About the same as my 5 x 9gig 5.25" 70GB FDDI attached array run by a SPARC20 that cost almost $25k back in the day...

    A couple of years ago I duplicated the system I sold for $500k that incorporated this array, a FDDI switch, and a half doz SGI Indigo 2's for less than $1000. Really underscores the adage that when it comes to computing, if you don't need it now, don't buy it now.

    1. Re:cheap stuff by Kalle+Barfot · · Score: 1

      I'm intrigued by your comment. How would you put these disks together and set up the RAID hw/se? I'd appreciate a URL to a recipe.

      --
      "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." -- Tennyson
  56. Those Crazy fortunes by Matey-O · · Score: 3, Interesting
    How appropriate that the quote at the bottom of the page for this article is:
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
    --
    "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
    1. Re:Those Crazy fortunes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's actually an American version of the same product, made by Lacie. Lacie.com for models ranging from 200GB - 1.6 TB

  57. LaCie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    LaCie has had a 1.6TB drive for a while now. $2000
    They also offer a 1TB drive for $1000. I'm looking at the catalogue right now :)

  58. USB?!? 1394a?!? That's a huge iPod! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No really, get the @#$! out of here. It's almost insulting to put a usb port on the back of that or even a Firewire 400. Does anyone have 1.6TB of data that they are going to be transfering in such small amounts as to use 400Mb per second bandwidth? I wonder how long it would take to fill the thing? Couple of days maybe? It's a little slow for video but I guess if you have 1.6TB of Music it would be great. Yep that new music thing is great. Seriously can any think of what this would be good for? Back up would be slow, video would be slow, servering files would crawl. Oh yea, it only has one port for each as well!

  59. Re:Who needs it? I'll get one from China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, that wasn't funny. How the hell are your negroes supposed to harvest cotton in your basement? It's details like that that spoil good jokes.

  60. Filesystems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that website did not say what filesystem the harddrives are formated to, if they use a windoze file system i rather see it use FAT32 than NTFS, but if the user is given a choice there is ext3, i would not touch that thing with reiserfs as i seen too much data loss with reieserfs...

    let the filesystem flame wars begin :^P

  61. a cheaper alternative by BlueYoshi · · Score: 1

    Look here: Raid system with firewire connectivity just change the internal hard drive and you have it.

    --
    "Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
  62. Duh... by sczimme · · Score: 1


    Stupid metric system... what's the conversion rate from boatloads to Libraries of Congress?

    You first have to convert boatload to volkswagen, and THEN convert to libocong. IIRC there are 6.3 volkswagens to the boatload, assuming these are metric boatloads. If they are Imperial boatloads, the equation becomes much more problematic (probably because of all the stormtroopers).

    --
    I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
  63. Shoes by u16084 · · Score: 1

    Shoebox, thats all it is... Still looking for a 3000$ pair of Nikes... .. fancy Box, cheap drives... Nice little LED in front for 3k? keep it.

    --
    -- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
  64. WoW by Shadow_139 · · Score: 1

    A 1.6TB Drive reported on ./ and no comments about filling it with Porn?!?!?

    "NIPPLES!! I HAVE NO NIPPLES!!!" -Happy Noodle Boy

  65. No LInux Support ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    System Requirements: FireWire 800 (9-pin)-equipped computer: Mac OS 10.2.4 and greater; Windows 2000 and Windows XP
    computer equipped with FireWire 400 (6-pin) or iLink (4-pin): Mac OS 9.x and Mac OS 10.x; Windows 2000 and Windows XP


    Can this run on Linux anyway?

  66. MythTV and all that jazz by killmenow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just a quick question:

    Does MythTV or another tool have an ability to basically create your own TV channel?

    That is, if I took all of my DVDs and encoded them (DivX, or whatever...), could I basically set up a box to keep a stream playing all the time, randomly jumping around the entire library?

    1. Re:MythTV and all that jazz by Politburo · · Score: 1

      ObOpenSourceAnswer: Yes. Write it yourself. :)

    2. Re:MythTV and all that jazz by macemoneta · · Score: 1

      You want VideoLAN. You've probably used the vlc client software, but there's a server too.

      --

      Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.

    3. Re:MythTV and all that jazz by killmenow · · Score: 1

      Thanks for that link, but that's not precisely I want. I'm talking about a box that takes those various inputs and either (a) recodes them into an R/F signal I can plug directly into my television's coax input, or (b) spits them out an S-Video, or component, or composite feed to a TV. I'm not after an Ethernet video feed.

      Let me give you an example of what I'm thinking: I have several seasons of The Simpsons on DVD as well as other series I enjoy and a bunch of movies I like. I would like to rip these all onto a system, encoded as DiVX or whatever, and let that system constantly stream them (in random order) so that I would in effect have my own "The Simpsons" channel and my own "Movie channel" etc. with the ability to move around through the channels much like you do with TV anyway...only with my system I'm guaranteed no commercials and I know I like what's on.

    4. Re:MythTV and all that jazz by OverlordQ · · Score: 1

      Yes, look for a set-top box by Aminocom or Pace Micro combine this with either VLC or VLS streaming your shows over a fast ethernet connection and you could make your own 'channel'.

      --
      Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  67. Moderator On Crack. by jellomizer · · Score: 1

    Who Modded Me up. I was wrong!

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  68. 1.6TB for $1,850. by rindeee · · Score: 1

    Actually, you can pick up the LaCie that numerous others have mentioned for about $1850. Just Froogle it for an assortment of sources.

  69. Me and My TiVo by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 1

    Will this just let my TiVo record for the rest of my life? After all, making decisions on what to delete is just sooo stressful.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  70. Re:Who needs it? I'll get one from China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes, very funny. Who the hell modded this racist crap up.

    People who can take a joke.

    How about having 30 blacks in my basement to harvest cotten so I never need to buy clothes again.

    That would actually be cruel to say since blacks were enslaved at one point. The original joke makes fun of a positive racial stereotype associated with asians...their ability to do math better than any other race. Have you ever seen the SAT scores broken down by race? Seriously whites should get affermative action when it comes to math scores on the SAT. Or at least whites that live near pearl harbor.

    See that wasn't really funny at all although it is the same joke.

    It wasn't even close

    You sir are a racist!

    Far from, but you sir are another dickless drone who thinks everything is racist. Seriously, lighten up. Whity isn't out to get anyone.

  71. Not mine by supergiovane · · Score: 4, Funny
    Unfortunately, my Internet broke yesterday. I backed it up last week by dragging it from the desktop to the CDR, but I don't know how to copy it back to my PC. I see it on the CD, but if I click the 'e' it doesn't do anything.

    Can anyone send me a working Internet by e-mail, please?

    --
    Signatures are for stupids.
    1. Re:Not mine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You laugh, but at work I once saw a guy drag the icon of his hard disk in My Computer to his USB flash drive to back it up (it simply created a shortcut of course). I tried to explain it to him but he wasn't convinced, even though it appeared to back it up instantly. In the end I took the flash drive to another PC to demonstrate, but of course the shortcut opened the hard disk on the local pc, the contents of which were similar enough to his to convince him that it in fact had worked. I gave up.

    2. Re:Not mine by Thavius · · Score: 1

      I have the internet on a floppy disk stuck to my fridge with a magnet. Let me get it for you. What is your e-mail address? I will attach the floppy to it.

    3. Re:Not mine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Serves him right if his HD crashed and eventually find out he has nothing backed-up.

    4. Re:Not mine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They would jump to the next logical conclusion...virus!(omfgwtfbbq)

  72. The thing that sucks is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...if this is going to be used in a business, you would have to buy two so you can back up all that data.

  73. Already old news? by Jozer99 · · Score: 1

    Didn't Lacie relase their 1.6TB Bigger Disk a couple of months ago, for less money?

  74. only 1.2TB .. ? by pecko666 · · Score: 1

    Have anyone noticed that there is ligtning blue 1.2TB label on that box?? Is it some older model ?? (hint: older == cheaper ??)

  75. I can get 1.6TB in 3 shoeboxes for under $1000 by davidwr · · Score: 1

    Over thanksgiving, several stores had 120-200GB EIDE drives on sale for $25/100GB after rebates.

    Between my friends and I, we could've picked up 1.6TB for about $500 including tax.

    8 used 2-drive enclosures should run well under $500. Plug 'em in and we are set.

    OK, it's not a single shoebox but it works.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  76. Media backup by MadEmperor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Everyone is going overboard about how this external unit is overpriced, however there are more things to consider than price.

    1. Many people have hundreds of gigs of movies in the form of divx, and would like to make a portable backup to travel.

    2. Building a cheap pc with internal hds is not always practical. It would have a much higher chance of breaking with all the extra parts, use more power, not be easy to move.

  77. Macs can be made look like an external disk by acomj · · Score: 1

    New macs have "Target disk mode" which you can boot your expensive computer in a special mode and make it look like a hard drive. Usefull for transfering to/from notebooks via firewire at high speeds.

    Apple also did ip over firewire.

    I don't know if linux supports any of these things but it might be worth looking into.

    FWIW bought a 2 bay firewire drive box ($100), because the cases are cheaper than the "computer as drive" solution. The dirves show up separately though. Its not to bad speed wise either. Not networkable. They have larger boxes (up to 4 drives). If you can Raid the external drives in linux this might be a good solution.

    External Sata cases are here, if you need a lot of speed.

    This also has somemore information:

    http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/30/ 18 4256&tid=198

  78. Too risky for data by Sarin · · Score: 1

    I see these things all of the time on internet, but what strikes me is that these little boxes never make use of raid-5, even the ones from lacie fail to have redundant drives inside. So if one of the internal drives fails you lose - all - of the data.

    It's nice to have an external 1.6tb disk, but not when you're forced to make 1.6tb backups (possibly having to buy a second one). What's the point then in having a 1.6tb databomb, chances that one drive fail are multiplied by the number of drives in these units.

    1. Re:Too risky for data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AH, i see...

      don't keep all your eggs in one basket, it would be better to have 4 seperate drives independant to one another so if one fails the rest dont go down with the ship...

    2. Re:Too risky for data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use the Lacie to as a temporary backup device.

      Every night our backups get dumped to the Lacie. Then the next day the tape drive picks up the data off the Lacie.

      The beauty of this is, if I need to do a restore, the data is sitting on disk rather then tape.

    3. Re:Too risky for data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not actually a straight multiplication. If the chance of one drive failing is 5% in the first year, then the chance of at least one drive failing is not quite n times 5%.

      I assume there's four 400GB drives in here (the metric GB, that is) so your answer is 1-(1-0.05)^4=0.18549375 not failing (1-0.05=0.95). Then finding the probability of all four not failing (0.95 x 0.95 x 0.95 x 0.95). And finally finding the chance of at least one failing (1 - the previous answer).

    4. Re:Too risky for data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      repost: guess I sould have previewed

      It's not actually a straight multiplication. If the chance of one drive failing is 5% in the first year, then the chance of at least one drive failing is not quite n times 5%.

      I assume there's four 400GB drives in here (the metric GB, that is) so your answer is 1-(1-0.05)^4=0.18549375 < 0.20

      Basically, what you're doing is finding the probability of one drive not failing (1-0.05=0.95). Then finding the probability of all four not failing (0.95 x 0.95 x 0.95 x 0.95). And finally finding the chance of at least one failing (1 - the previous answer).

  79. Metric ass-ton of storage? by Mulletproof · · Score: 1

    "IO Data Device's new 'HDZ-UE1.6TS' exemplifies the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities -- it's an external hard drive setup offering a total capacity of 1.6TB."

    Backup??? My p0rn collection will take up at least 3 of those.

    --
    You need a FREE iPod Nano
  80. Networking? by sagenumen · · Score: 1

    If I'm going to spend $2900 on storage, I would at least want it to be stand-alone network-accessible.

    What good is 1.6TB of data if I can't get it in a different room in my house?

    I know I could just share the drive, but what if my family members are connected and I have to reboot?

    For $2900, I could build a rather nice centralized PVR (with probably just as much storage) and stream the files to other computers/TVs in the house.

  81. WiebeTech RT5 by silicon-pyro · · Score: 2, Informative

    WiebeTech also has a product, the RT5, that has 2TB of storage. The price is much higher though. With this model, you can choose the RAID 0-5, and hot-swap the drives. They also purport to support Windows XP, 2K, Mac OS X, and Linux via dual Firewire 400/800 connections.

  82. You could do this for $300! by JeTmAn81 · · Score: 1

    Well, if you went to Best Buy on Black Friday and bought ten of those 160 gig drives they were selling for $29.99. And you could actually get Windows to see that many drives as one big drive...and you had a case big enough to fit that many drives.

    --
    "Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
    1. Re:You could do this for $300! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, but what is this "Windows?" /me thinks ur n00b

  83. Re:Who needs it? I'll get one from China by CrackedButter · · Score: 1


    What sort of "RAIT" do you have setup on those Inexpensive Teenagers? I might be interested in a similar setup

  84. Office 2003 by Johnny318 · · Score: 1

    Cool! If I had one of these I could install Microsoft Office 2003 with all options and run it all from Hard Drive!!! Awesome!!!

  85. Huh by mlylecarlin · · Score: 1

    Pfffft. That's not even 400 DVDs.

  86. Recent trend? by erroneus · · Score: 1

    Where has the author been??? We didn't stop at 640K for RAM, we didn't stop at 20MB for HD storage...although our floppies stopped at 1.4MB...hrm... But the quest for ever more storage isn't a "recent" trend -- it has been a perpetual and ongoing thing and probably always will be.

  87. It's a span by Corellon+Larethian · · Score: 1, Informative

    With an internal controller and a USB port. Neat. I guess you can hook it up to a wireless storage AP if that's your thing.

    The ARAID 2000 goes for $370. 400 GB hard disks for for $355 on pricewatch. Buy a mobile rack and shove 3.2 TB in there for half the price.

    Probably triple the performance as well...

  88. For Photos and videos there is never enough by acomj · · Score: 1

    I've filled 2x200 gig hard drives with photos I've taken. A typical 45 mm scan at 4000 dpi ends up at 70-90 meg with 24 bit color. a 6x4.5 cm scan ends up at over 170 megs at 24 bit color. Double the size numbers for 48 bit color.

    I don't like to turn them to jpegs because well I don't like the lossy encoding for archiving. I do end up backing them up as high quality jpegs.

    Video has the same issues. Never enough space.

    1. Re:For Photos and videos there is never enough by lucabrasi999 · · Score: 1
      I've filled 2x200 gig hard drives with photos I've taken

      Maybe I am missing something here, why don't you just move all of your jpeg files to CD-ROM? That would free up about 400 G of disk space.

    2. Re:For Photos and videos there is never enough by lucabrasi999 · · Score: 1

      ...Or maybe DVD ROM. There are other media besides hard drive.

  89. MythTV storage by falser · · Score: 1

    Once I got MythTV into regular use I found I very rarely used up all 120GB that I had reserved for it. Generally I'd hover at about 50% storage capacity. So I swapped the drive out and have been doing just fine with only 60GB. There really isn't enough on TV to fill up hundreds and hundreds of gigs of space. A tivo with 300GB capacity is only for real couch potatoes.

  90. Remember when... by Mr_Blank · · Score: 1

    Just a while ago that kind of money would get you an astounding 15 megabyte harddrive. You could add an amazing 15 million characters of high speed storage for just $2495 (plus installation kit).
    see this ad.

    Wow!

  91. 1.6? Uh... Try 1.2. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Did anyone else notice that the front of the "box" itself says 1.2TB where everything else says 1.6 TB? Sounds kinda fishy...

  92. OT: Best Buy is crooked by davidwr · · Score: 2, Informative

    Even the Ohio Attorney General thinks so.

    Yeah, I'm offtopic, but I'm also informative. So there. :P

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  93. 1.6 T in a shoebox for $2900 by Coffeehound · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It was not that many years ago.... OK, it was a long time, when Radio Shack was selling a 5K Tandy hard drive (the size of two shoeboxes) for $5,000.

    1. Re:1.6 T in a shoebox for $2900 by diamondsw · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I'm not buying that. A 5K hard drive? By the time Radio Shack was in the game, 5MB probably. Floppies of that era held 80-160KB.

      --
      I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
    2. Re:1.6 T in a shoebox for $2900 by Coffeehound · · Score: 1

      You are correct, I am not that old. It was 5MB. A few years later at Comdex we saw two 500MB drives hooked together on a table (they took up about the size of a small card table) and together they made up a Gigabyte. We were impressed.

  94. Anyone remember Washing Machines? by davidwr · · Score: 1

    Great-Grandpa used to tell me stories about washing machine hard disks.

    They were removable, mega-expensive, and didn't hold much. Only the dean and system administrators were allowed to store stuff on them.

    It was a big scandal the day they removed a disk and a pair of panties came out with it.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    1. Re:Anyone remember Washing Machines? by tricorn · · Score: 1

      Head crashes on those disk packs made for lots of fun. Take the aluminum platters (the magnetic material is coated on it), and play dodge-the-leg-cleaving-disks down a long dimly-lit hallway. You send the disks skittering down the hall (vertically) with a back-flip. If it goes off course, it can bury itself in a wooden door frame an inch or so. The spinning keeps it mostly stable, but after it gets a bit bent up and battered it can take on "interesting" (i.e. "dangerous") characteristics.

      The steel fire-doors were fairly resilient, but one platter managed to go right through the crack between the two doors, and left a pretty good dent in the radiator on the other side.

  95. only 4000 dpi? by davidwr · · Score: 1

    Real photographers use 10,000+ dpi!

    Replace my 35mm camera? Not until they get 150 megapixels for under a grand.

    They better be good pixels too, not the crappy 24- or 36-bit pixels you get in some cheap units. I want 96 bits per pixel or more!

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  96. But you have to admit... by benhocking · · Score: 1

    you'll feel far more confortable talking about pebifiles than petafiles. :)

    --
    Ben Hocking
    Need a professional organizer?
  97. That's been around since the original Mac-Laptop by davidwr · · Score: 1

    When the first laptop Mac came out, one of the selling points was that you could connect the SCSI cable to an existing Mac, hold down some magic keys when booting, and it's disk would show up on the other Mac as an external SCSI drive.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  98. OT: SuSE 9.1 defaults to reiser by davidwr · · Score: 1

    I doubt Novell would've done that if Reiserfs was that unreliable.

    Maybe you had an older build of reiser?

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  99. Limit 1 per customer with rebate. by davidwr · · Score: 1

    Limit 3 per store.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  100. 2900 today by geekoid · · Score: 1

    buck and a half next year. ;)

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  101. No you couldn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Out of disk space.

  102. Hot Swap? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Right on. This past weekend, I priced out a 2.5 Tb roll-your-own NAS box from Newegg for about $2500.

    Question for the audience: Does the 2.6 kernel support SATA hot-swap yet? I know you can get add-in boards that present virual SCSI hot-swap for plenty of money, but I'd like to do it with cheap controllers.

    I'm pretty darn happy with XServe RAID under linux but I'm always watching for the cheap alternative.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  103. Awesome until one of the drives fail by nolife · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We recieved two of these from a vendor for data processing. Half way into coping the files off, the device stopped responding and we started to get the dreaded head clacking from one of the drives, the whole device and all the data on them is now useless to us. I am not a statistician but I assume a 5 drive device would have a 5 times greater chance of failing then a single drive would. Those are not very good chances based on my experience in the past few years with IDE drives. YMMV

    --
    Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
  104. Not cheap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    its stupid
    its not cheap enough for me to not want to investigate a better solution

    get 4 x 400Gb maxtor drives.. cheap, under 1K for sho
    get a usb 2.0 hub for 20$
    get 4 of those things:
    http://www.cwol.com/usb/usb-2-ide-adapter -ud200.ht m

    the hardest to find is a decent shoebox casing with power supply

    the rest is trivial

    of course its not firewire. but its a lot cheaper. and expandable.

  105. RAID by Mistah+Blue · · Score: 1

    You need to get another one and mirror. Personally, I'd rather see the vendor implement RAID-5 at a minimum in the enclosure via hardware. Ideally, you would get option to do RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5, or RAID-10, or even JBOD.

  106. Your using it wrong... by Belial6 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have an 80 hour, and a 120 hour ReplayTV, as well as a 250 hour drive in a PC for the server (http://www.dvarchive.organdistilloccasionallyruno utofspace./
    How do I do this? I often set up channels for things that I MIGHT watch. For example WAM has been showing the TV show 'Weird Science'. Now, when I set up the channel, I didn't KNOW I was going to watch it, but thought that I MIGHT want to watch it. So, I set up a 10 hour channel, and let it run. A month later, I noticed that I had 10 hours of this show, so I had a 'Weird Science' Marathon. It was entertaining, and didn't require constant attention.

    My wife has programs that she recorded over a year ago, and still hasn't seen. I have no doubt she will eventually watch them, as I periodically see her watch old shows.

    'Good Eats' alone has 120 episodes, and at a medium quality takes up ~120 gigs. (2gb/hour * 60 hrs = 120 gig)br
    The real benefit of DVRs is not that they make better VCRs. The real benefit is in allowing you to watch WHAT you want WHEN you want it. That requires a lot of disk space.

  107. Oops. by Belial6 · · Score: 1

    http://www.dvarchive.org/ and I still occasionally run out of space.

  108. Re:Like the coyote finaly getting the Road Runner. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    if u buy a bunch of them, glue handles on them, it it IS for backup. prob cheaper and faster than tape of the same size.

  109. And now in english: by Crag · · Score: 1

    Funny story: I worked at a startup four years ago, and EMC tried to get me fired for not buying their $3.6m 1.5TB system. Then the salesman went into his "I'm going to lose my job if you don't buy it" routine. They also claimed we weren't testing it correctly. We were testing through a server attached to a load farm housing copies of real work data.

    Never buy anything from EMC. They fired their engineers years ago. EMC is a sales and marketing company. They even run their Clarion equipment on embeded Windows.

    Our company acquired $68m in venture capital in about 2 (years?).

    1. Re:And now in english: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Thank you, Crag. I was just about to reply to the original poster asking what on earth he was talking about. Now I know.

      Do you provide this editing service often? If so, I might start tracking your posts more closely....

  110. Backups as jpgs. by acomj · · Score: 1

    I like to keep the "non compressed" version of the scan. This has proved usefull as better photo manipulation/grain reduction algorithms come out I'm worry about compression artifacts after 4-5 generations of manipulate/save.

    I don't keep backups of those "raw scanned" images except as jpgs on dvd roms. They take up too much room (and I still have the negatives somewhere around here...). And high quality JPEG is very good.

    I did a test where I overlayed a jpg on the original image in photoshop and did a "diff". The jpg is a remarkably good approximation of the original image.

    I have an perl/image magick script that turns all recursively turns my uncompressed images into jpgs for easy back. Also can change the size for much much easier browsing.

    You can see my early poor perl skills. One of my first perl projects from a while ago. Works well though. (before they had an image_magick perl module so I use the sys call).
    http://www.plocp.com/code/photo_convert.pl 2

  111. Re:only 4000 dpi for negatives.. by acomj · · Score: 1


    One of the nice things about negatives is 4000 dpi isn't too much when the original you scan is very very small. That and there harder to loose than files.

    I shoot for 250-300 dpi when I make a print as "photographic" quality.

    mmmmm bits..

  112. RAID 0 = your data is vulnerable by haggar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    These 4 disks are striped (RAID 0), which is great for performance, but if any of the drives fails, you lost all the 1.6 TB of data. Given that there are 4 drives in the enclosure, your chances of a disk failure are about 4 times higher than that of a single drive.

    Bear in mind that typically, these disk enclosures for home use have poor ventilation, so the likelyhood of a drive failing is higher than with the PCs internal drives.

    For me, the odds don't seem good. I would much rather have RAID 1 + 0 (two mirrored disksets that are then striped) with half the capacity but better protection from data loss.

    This is precisely the reason why I am holding off from buying one of these disk boxes, even though I like the idea of having a place to store all my CD images - and more.

    --
    Sigged!
    1. Re:RAID 0 = your data is vulnerable by EmagGeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why would you do Raid 1+0 with 4 drives when you can get higher capacity with Raid 5? You'd have 3x the capacity of a single drive instead of 2x.

    2. Re:RAID 0 = your data is vulnerable by haggar · · Score: 1

      My experience has been that performance of RAID 1 + 0 is better than RAID 5. And it has a bit more rendundancy: you can have 2 drives fail, and it will still work (as long as the 2 drives are not part of the same mirror).

      But, performance mostly.

      --
      Sigged!
    3. Re:RAID 0 = your data is vulnerable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is why I ordered 4x 500GB LaCie Big Disk Extreme devices from buy.com for less than $415 each with free shipping 2-3 weeks ago. That's only $0.83/GB. It's a good balance of cost/GB and number/size of devices for my needs. I have them configured as a RAID5 array right now using Linux Software RAID.

      That gives me 1.5TB of usable space for $1650. That's close to $1/GB of RAID5 storage, and it's easy to add to any machine (you just need at least one FireWire 400 or 800 port). Buy more controllers or faster controllers to increase your performance if that's important to you.

    4. Re:RAID 0 = your data is vulnerable by Doppler00 · · Score: 1

      I run RAID0 with 2 drives right now and it's kind of scary to think if one drive fails I lose everything (inbetween my weekly or monthly backups).

      Your data would have to be pretty worthless to run RAID0 with 4 drives.

      How much of a warranty does this have? Better be at least 3 years. 5 would be better.

  113. COME ON. by CatOne · · Score: 1

    This box does NOT have the same functionality of EMC Symmetrix. It's not even close.

    That $3.6 M price (which IS ridiculous, I'll give you that), comes with an actual HUMAN who sits in your data center and plays Tetris on that EMC box, and if a drive fails he swaps it out with the one he has sitting on the shelf. It's Cadillac level service, with an F1 car price tag (sorry for the bad metaphors, I need mor e coffee ;-)

    This is just a storage box. And it's more expensive than throwing 4 SATA drives in an enclosure. It's on the "dirt cheap" end, with reliability to match. It makes things like Apple's Xserve RAID look "high end" and "expensive" though products like Xserve RAID are still DIRT cheap from a storage standpoint (enterprise storage has different QOS than the pr0n box you have sitting next to your home PC).

  114. Re:Who needs it? I'll get one from China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I thought the original was a comment on outsourcing myself.

  115. Taken from bash.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1
    1. Re:Taken from bash.org by k512-arch · · Score: 0

      yeah, i hate people like that.

  116. USB??? by advocate_one · · Score: 1

    how long would it take to do a box to box copy over the USB interface then????????? and if you're in a panic to securely wipe that drive, then you will need plenty of advance warning... or else quick access to a good oxy/acetylene torch...

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  117. DIY boxing by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 1

    So I buy a $500 P4/2.4GHz/1GB box, stuff in 4 $350 400GB EIDE drives, install Linux and a softRAID, and have 1.6TB for $1900. And I have access to the entire system, without sending my money to Japan (it goes to Taiwan instead). So it's 4x the size of the drives themselves - who cares? If it doesn't fit in my pocket, and needs power and fanspace, it doesn't matter until it's too big to fit under my desk.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  118. 1.6 TB External Drive by mshayda · · Score: 1

    If you guys like this drive then you'll like this one better:

    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10 55 1

    We've got a couple of these at my work and it works extremely well. Here are the specs if you don't want to go to the weblink:

    LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1.6TB
    Item Number: 300773
    Capacity: 1.6 TB
    Interface: FireWire 800 (9-pin, 2 ports) and FireWire 400 (6-pin, 1 port)
    Rotational Speed(rpm): 7200
    Interface Transfer Rate: FireWire 800: 800 Mbits/s (100MB/s), FireWire 400: 400 Mbits/s (50MB/s)
    Max Sustained Transfer Rate: FireWire 800: up to 85MB/s, FireWire 400: up to 40MB/s
    Average Seek Time (Write): 10 ms
    Buffer: 4x 8MB
    Size: 6.3 x 3.4 x 10.6 in / 173 x 88 x 268 mm
    Weight: 11.02 lbs. / 5000g

  119. Well... by Atario · · Score: 1

    All that spyware ain't gonna store itself, people!

    --
    "A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
  120. Wasted space by supergiovane · · Score: 1

    By the time I've processed half of it, I will be totally blind, not to mention my handache.

    --
    Signatures are for stupids.
  121. Good, cheap(er) but not as fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you want slightly slower bulk storage, go get 6 400GB ata drives, two three port firewire (1394b) cards, and six external firewire (1394b) drive bays. The new firewire standard (1394b) supports data speeds up to 3200Mb/s (the old firewire standard (1394) only supported up to 400Mb/s). You can get 2.4TB of storage for a lot less than this. You can also remove some of the storage more easily, and upgrade incrementally as you like. It might not be as fast as this solution, but you get it at a fraction of the price.

  122. or you could to costco... by nilbog · · Score: 0

    ...and buy 250 gig hard drives for $150. Six of these would be close to the same size and still leave you under $1000.

    --
    or else!
  123. err, um, ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hate to admit it, but me. I'm in need of a backup/archive store, and I do have one WinME machine hanging around on the home net.

    WinME is the last time I sent money to billg. I only keep it around for Quicken. Everything else is FreeBSD.

    1. Re:err, um, ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Everything else is FreeBSD.

      And yes, I am a Dead Head. Why do you ask?

  124. No thanks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Overpriced and underperformed.

  125. Lacie Bigger Disk Extreme 1.6 TB $2100 by SeeMonkey · · Score: 1

    If you want something like this you oughta go with a reputable company. Lacie has a very good name in the graphic design, video and audio world(s).

    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10 55 1

  126. Blu-Ray? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd think it would be cheaper to buy a blu-ray or HD DVD recorder. Or even a few of them. Or one recorder and several read-only drives. 50GB on one disk is a *lot* of storage and would work well for music, videos, etc.
    Oops. Just checed prices. I was wrong. Looks like a recorder is $3K right now. But this is a stanalone device, not an internal (IDE) one. I would expect the internal ones will be less. http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/ sharp-bdhd100-first-bluraydvdhard-drive-recorder-0 25428.php

  127. Overpriced by Supp0rtLinux · · Score: 1

    LaCie has had their Bigger Disk for over a year now. 1TB of storage that's exactly the size of 4 3.5'' HDs because it has 4 3.5'' HDs in it. Plus it connects externally via USB2, FW400, or FW800. And its only $1200.00 US last time I checked. So even two of these would be less than the one this article described and would yield more storage. My only complaint about these is the short warranty for a non-redundant system. The 1TB LaCie has a 1 year warranty, but its internal drives aren't striped or RAIDed. As such, if one drive fails, you're screwed. And with 4 drives, the odds of failure of at least one are pretty high. While I have 3 of these myself, I'd like to see one with a RAIDed set to allow for some internal fault tolerance.

  128. I'm getting 3 of these bad boys by commander_line · · Score: 1

    Now all I need is a pci-express -> firewire RAID controller dammit. Guess I can just use Win XP Pro's built in raid, I hear it's really speedy. ;) Seriously, this product is just about as useless as a paper weight. Who's going to shell out $3k for a "desktop" data storage system that's so easily corruptable. One drive fails, the whole shebang is corrupted. Not good. The controller fails, you can't get another one off the shelf. Then there's the issue of speed. A system set up like this only runs at the speed of one hard drive. That hardly pushes the envelope of the firewire port. I'm going to have to agree with the others around here. I'd much rather build up a NAS box with Gigabit Ethernet, dual raid controllers running 3 drives in RAID 5 each that only gives me 400 MB total storage for the roughly the same price. Fast, secure, and maintainable will always beat big in my book.

  129. Or just buy this: by fhammond · · Score: 1

    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1

    LaCie make very reliable products and have fantasic customer service.

  130. Infrant NAS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I picked up one of these: ReadyNAS 600.

    I built it with 4 x 300GB in Raid 5. Even with 400GB drives it would have cost almost $1000 cheaper. And it has gigabit ethernet, SMB/NFS/AppleTalk/FTP connections. Also Wireless and Print Server ready. Far more then a USB only device which costs a lot more.

  131. $2900 what?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For goodness sake, we are an international community.

    Are we talking Canadian dollars, US dollars, Australian dollars? Or are all Americans so ego-centric that America is the world?

    What's so hard about writing
    US$2900

    or an UNAMBIGUOUS date format of dd-mmm-yyyy?

    Sincerely,
    The rest of the world

  132. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of shoeboxes!!!! by clickster · · Score: 1

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of shoeboxes!!!!

    --
    If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
  133. SATA firewire case Re:Creative paperweight... by holysin · · Score: 1

    Speaking of SATA drives getting bigger... Has any of the firewire/USB2 case makers jumped on the SATA bandwagon yet, or does one still have to use a converter?

  134. Performance of home made versions of this? by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    There's plenty of comments here about building your own unit with a LAN port on it.
    I'm curious if anyone has done this and what kind of _REAL WORLD_ performance has been attained??

    I have a friend wanting to move his storage system out of his primary PC and into the cupboard but he needs acceptable transfer rates.

    Does anyone know any _REAL WORLD_ figures of say your standard P4 motherboard with onboard intel gigabit lan and XP (no comments please) reading from say some form of linux box (i'm assuming that's the best way of setting up this NAS box) ?

    Let's assume that the device we put the disks in can read and write (locally) the full speed the disks are capable.
    Example approximately 25->40mb a second writes and approx 35-60mb a second reads.

    Anyone managed to actually attain this over standard gigabit with normal desktop / mid range hardware (no fibre / 600$ PCI cards)
    ???

  135. Re:Boatload? Nah, Metric's not the problem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem is the amazingly imprecise term "boatload".

    Just how big is a "boatload"? What are we talking about here, anyway? Kayaks, canoes, Hobies, pocket cruisers, world cruisers, freighters, the Titanic? What?

    It's all just too confusing.

    I need buttloads. That works for me. Yeah, give it to me in metric "buttloads".

    This is something I understand.

  136. What the world needs- a $3k MAXTOR HD..not by wegster · · Score: 1

    It works out to ~$2800USD according to one of the currency converters. For wow, let's see...a single volume spanning 4 disks...amazing, now where have I heard that idea before? Hmm, RAID sets, volume managers...so maybe there's something else there worth something? Uhh...great, a few Maxtor SATA drives. Yep, just what *I* want to put important info on...and wait, it gets better...USB!

    Ok, so it's a consumer device obviously...I'll try to ignore my personal (including working with RAID and other enterprise storage) observations on failure rates of ATA and SATA (and Maxtor..) drives versus FC(yeah, $$$) and SCSI disks.

    So now we're left with what- I can't read Japanese, but considering the size it's not doing redundant RAID of any kind, but now you have 4x the chance of losing a single disk that's going to wipe out your pr0n. True, what a giant collection of pr0n that would be, but having important data on any IDE/ATA/SATA disk without at least doing mirroring or RAID5, is just insane, even for 'a 'consumer.' I might be interested if you could buy two of these along with a RAID card, however...for $1k or so :-)

    --
    Scott
    Unix Developer, Admin and Linux Freak/Geek at Large
  137. What I really want to know is by Propaganda13 · · Score: 1

    Can I partition this into 4 ~400GB partitions?

  138. I will Stab you in the FACE over the INTERNET by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yeah, i hate people like that.

    Yeah, well I'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet. Then we won't have to worry about people like the great great grandparent poster.

  139. 4x the chance of losing your data? by rustman · · Score: 1

    These LaCie and any of these that aren't RAID5 stand a good chance of losing your data... if one of the disks die, the whole volume is toast.

  140. Re:Well within the capabilities of your average... by Sinner · · Score: 1

    Why is this modded "funny"?

    --
    fish and pipes
  141. Same price as a 1GB drive. by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 1
    Back around 1990 I got my first 1GB drive. It cost us %3500CDN (almost exactly $2900US -- not including 15 years of inflation). It was a full-height 5" drive (most CD players are half-height). so this would actually make the 1GB drive larger than this 1TB unit.

    Back then, 1GB was a friggin HUGE ammount of data to have in one box. Today it's a novelty thumb drive.

    --
    Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  142. Re: Who would have a use for this type of storage by Sinner · · Score: 1

    15 year old boys. See above.

    --
    fish and pipes
  143. Not enough lifetime by DaracMarjal · · Score: 1

    1.6TB?

    Based on the recent posting from Plusnet, that's about three months worth of downloading over ADSL.

  144. So by orasio · · Score: 1

    They are Space-mountain certified!!

  145. Make by solemnwarning · · Score: 1

    If I Actually Needed This Kind Of Space I Would Just Get A Case, Maybe A Cube Shell, Stick Some Hdd's In There On Either IDE Or Raid 0+1 And Setup Fedora Core 3 Much Cheaper, More Stable, Much More Reliable, And Can Be Just Plugged Into A Hub And Remotly Accesed :)