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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.)
But seriously... with this and an optical data line, running your own household Usenet server starts to become practical.
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."
the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities
This is a recent trend?
how many internets can this hold?
6 250gb hd's a good controller for ~$1200? what is the point of this besides having another toy?
But then where do I put my shoes?
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.
Supported operating systems are Windows Me, 2000 and XP.
It doesn't support any of unices.
And I thought 640Kb was enough!
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
LaCie has an external FireWire800/USB2 external drive available for about $1000, see here.
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.
Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?
Only $2199. Been available for a while now, there's probably a Slashdot story about it too.5 1
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=105
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 :)
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC= 659765
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?
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!
LaCie's 1.6TB drive lists for $2199, their older 1TB drive is $999.
I'd rather have the $2,900 in a shoebox, thanks
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.
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.
$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?
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?
1 Apple Xserve Raids?
Dashboard Widgets
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.
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
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!
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!
Y'know, it would have been funnier if I'd gotten the units right the first time.
-Mark, pre-coffee
Archiving video is becoming a mainstream activity these days :-)
> 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!
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!"
Like the coyote. You finaly obtain it.
But then have that sick realization of "How are you going to back up this bad boy?"
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.
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."
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.
for /dev/null ...
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
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.
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.
"(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
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 $1000. Really underscores the adage that when it comes to computing, if you don't need it now, don't buy it now.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
But aren't they already available "on demand"? One day, you say to yourself, "Hey, I want to watch Used Cars again! I have only seen it fifteen times!" You simply walk over to the DVD case, pull out the movie you want to see, and plop it into the DVD player. Voila, it's playing on your TV!.
Or, have we all reached the point where actually standing up and walking over to the DVD case is just too much work?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Look here: Raid system with firewire connectivity just change the internal hard drive and you have it.
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
Stupid metric system... what's the conversion rate from boatloads to Libraries of Congress?
You first have to convert boatload to volkswagen, and THEN convert to libocong. IIRC there are 6.3 volkswagens to the boatload, assuming these are metric boatloads. If they are Imperial boatloads, the equation becomes much more problematic (probably because of all the stormtroopers).
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Shoebox, thats all it is... Still looking for a 3000$ 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
A 1.6TB Drive reported on ./ and no comments about filling it with Porn?!?!?
"NIPPLES!! I HAVE NO NIPPLES!!!" -Happy Noodle Boy
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?
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.
Actually, you can pick up the LaCie that numerous others have mentioned for about $1850. Just Froogle it for an assortment of sources.
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."
Can anyone send me a working Internet by e-mail, please?
Signatures are for stupids.
Didn't Lacie relase their 1.6TB Bigger Disk a couple of months ago, for less money?
Have anyone noticed that there is ligtning blue 1.2TB label on that box?? Is it some older model ?? (hint: older == cheaper ??)
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.
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.
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.
/ 18 4256&tid=198
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
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.
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/
"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
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.
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.
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."
What sort of "RAIT" do you have setup on those Inexpensive Teenagers? I might be interested in a similar setup
Jonathanjk.com
Cool! If I had one of these I could install Microsoft Office 2003 with all options and run it all from Hard Drive!!! Awesome!!!
Pfffft. That's not even 400 DVDs.
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.
Yes we have reached that point...
Jonathanjk.com
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...
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.
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.
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!
Even the Ohio Attorney General thinks so.
:P
Yeah, I'm offtopic, but I'm also informative. So there.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you'll feel far more confortable talking about pebifiles than petafiles. :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
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.
Limit 3 per store.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
buck and a half next year. ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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)
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
get nemulator
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)
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.
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.
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.
http://www.dvarchive.org/ and I still occasionally run out of space.
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?).
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.
l 2
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.p
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..
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!
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).
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.
original
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.
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
If you guys like this drive then you'll like this one better:
0 55 1
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=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
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
By the time I've processed half of it, I will be totally blind, not to mention my handache.
Signatures are for stupids.
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.
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!
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).
0 55 1
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=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.
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.
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
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1
LaCie make very reliable products and have fantasic customer service.
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 ownerI 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 playerWell, 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.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of shoeboxes!!!!
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
You can have 1200 DVDs on demand for $3200
You forgot the price of 1200 DVDs. Tack on another $24,000.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Speaking of SATA drives getting bigger... Has any of the firewire/USB2 case makers jumped on the SATA bandwagon yet, or does one still have to use a converter?
There's plenty of comments here about building your own unit with a LAN port on it.
I'm curious if anyone has done this and what kind of _REAL WORLD_ performance has been attained??
I have a friend wanting to move his storage system out of his primary PC and into the cupboard but he needs acceptable transfer rates.
Does anyone know any _REAL WORLD_ figures of say your standard P4 motherboard with onboard intel gigabit lan and XP (no comments please) reading from say some form of linux box (i'm assuming that's the best way of setting up this NAS box) ?
Let's assume that the device we put the disks in can read and write (locally) the full speed the disks are capable.
Example approximately 25->40mb a second writes and approx 35-60mb a second reads.
Anyone managed to actually attain this over standard gigabit with normal desktop / mid range hardware (no fibre / 600$ PCI cards)
???
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
Can I partition this into 4 ~400GB partitions?
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.
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.
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
Why is this modded "funny"?
fish and pipes
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.
15 year old boys. See above.
fish and pipes
1.6TB?
Based on the recent posting from Plusnet, that's about three months worth of downloading over ADSL.
They are Space-mountain certified!!
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 :)
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.
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.