A Look at Excessive Portable Storage

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo's all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech's flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie's state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5" drives. LaCie's drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the $600 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

Comments

tsarkon reports phirt poast GREASY YODA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Tsarkon Reports 9 Step Yoda Grease

9 steps to greasing your anus for Yoda Doll Insertion!
v 4.90.0
$YodaBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/yodanotes/9stepprocess.sgml,v 4.90.0 2009/03/19 03:32:50 tsarkon Exp $

1. Defecate. Preferably after eating senna, ex lax, prunes, cabbage, pickled eggs, and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce. To better enhance the pleasure of this whole process, defecation should be performed in the Return of the Jedi wastebasket for added pleasure.
2. Wipe ass with witch hazel, which soothes horrific burns. (Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda certifies that his lips, raw like beaten flank steak from nearly continuous analingus with dogs, are greatly soothed by witch hazel.)
3. Prime anus with anal ease. (Now Cherry Flavored for those butthole lick-o-phillic amongst you - very popular with 99% of the Slashdotting public!)
4. Slather richly a considerable amount of Vaseline and/or other anal lubricants into your rectum at least until the bend and also take your Yoda Doll , Yoda Shampoo bottle or Yoda soap-on-a-rope and liberally apply the lubricants to the Doll/Shampoo/Soap-on-a-rope.
5. Put a nigger do-rag on Yoda's head so the ears don't stick out like daggers!
6. Make sure to have a mechanism by which to fish Yoda out of your rectum, the soap on the rope is especially useful because the retrieval mechanism is built in.
7. Pucker and relax your balloon knot several times actuating the sphincter muscle in order to prepare for what is to come.
8. Slowly rest yourself onto your Yoda figurine. Be careful, he's probably bigger than the dicks normally being shoved up your ass!
9. Gyrate gleefully in your computer chair while your fat sexless geek nerd loser fat shit self enjoys the prostate massage you'll be getting. Think about snoodling with the Sarlaac pit. Read Slashdot. Masturbate to anime. Email one of the editors hoping they will honor you with a reply. Join several more dating services - this time, you don't select the (desired - speaks English) and (desired - literate). You figure you might get a chance then. Order some fucking crap from Think Geek. Get Linux to boot on a Black and Decker Appliance. Wish you could afford a new computer. Argue that cheap-ass discount bin hardware works 'just as well' as the quality and premium hardware because you can't afford the real stuff. Make claims about how Linux rules. Compile a kernel on your 486SX. Claim to hate Windows but use it for World of Warcraft. Admire Ghyslain's courage in making that wonderful Star Wars movie. Officially convert to the Jedi religion. Talk about how cool Mega Tokyo is. Try and make sure you do your regular 50 story submissions to Slashdot, all of which get rejected because people who aren't fatter than CowboyNeal can't submit. Fondle shrimpy penis while making a Yoda voice and saying, use the force, padawan, feeel the foooorce, hurgm. Yes. Yes. When 900 years you reach, a dick half as big you will not have.

All in a days

Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, That's right. They don't exists!

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[palegray.net]

Sure they do. You've got to strike the flash drive exactly three times with a nine pound hammer. I assure you, nobody will able to write to it again.

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[MoonBuggy]

Do you mean USB sticks with little write-protect tabs like floppies? They do exist, you know - I have one somewhere. Admittedly it's a bit old and thus only 128MB, but the functionality is there nonetheless.

A quick bit of Googling reveals that PQI still makes them in more useful capacities, and that they retain the write-protect tab. They're even still the same colour!

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[geirnord]

Doh...

That's not write protected, that's read-protected!!!

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[Ark42]

I think every single SD and SDHC card I have, has a little lock tab on the side you can flip to make it read-only.

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think every single SD and SDHC card I have, has a little lock tab on the side you can flip to make it read-only.

Don't rely on it. It doesn't affect any circuits inside the card, it just allows the card reader to detect that you have flipped the switch. Want to wager on what fraction of the readers in the marketplace actually do that?

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

IIRC, the write protect tab is actually obeyed in software on the client, not in hardware on the device, so it is more for convenience than anything.

You can get serious hardware write blockers, for forensic applications and the like; but they are priced like Real Serious Kit.

http://www.digitalintelligence.com/products/usb_write_blocker/

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. Ok, to get write-protection, you've got to strike any user attempting to write to your drive exactly three times with a nine pound hammer. I assure you, nobody will want to write to it again.

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[TwistedSymmetry]

It's also an excellent form of one-way encryption.

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG, I wish I had mod points. Mark that funny!

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, That's right. They don't exists!

Sure they exist, I own an 8 GB Imation Swivel with a switch that works very well. See http://gadgets.softpedia.com/gadgets/Computer-Peripherals/The-Imation-Swivel-Flash-Drive-Series-of-Portable-Storage-Solutions-2715.html

There are also some USB SD card adapters that respect the write protect switch of the SD card.

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[MoonBuggy]

Interesting, I didn't know that. I would guess the pricing on those things is partly due to the need for compatibility with multiple devices which weren't designed with it in mind and partly due to the niche market/'because we can' factor, right?

I'd be surprised if it were especially difficult to make a flash drive with hardware write-protection in mind, though. Considering what 4 or 8GB drives cost, even if you had to literally double up on every component in the drive and then physically switch between them for read only or read/write mode it should still come out on the slightly higher priced end of 'dirt cheap'. Whether there's sufficient demand to bother designing it, however, is probably another matter.

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[plover]

From recent playing with the CHDK software, I can assure you that my Canon SD-750 camera does not appear to respect the switch in terms of write protection. The switch merely enables it to pre-load a firmware flash before booting.

Re:Give me write-protected flash drives anyday!

[Anonymous Coward]

Redirecting the FS calls to DEV NULL has the same effect, and is many orders of magnitude faster in terms of file IO.

hey, this stuff suxs

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the js crap ? I'm outahere mule dog pigs

Re:hey, this stuff suxs

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even understand why anyone bothers posting such nonsense. At least be funny if you are going to spam.

Video and Photographers

[Samschnooks]

This is a wet dream for photographers and film makers!

Re:Video and Photographers

[couchslug]

"This is a wet dream for photographers and film makers!"

Bulk pron storage, gotta love it!

Bell curve

[Hognoxious]

Bell curve, eh. So what attribute are we plotting the distribution of? Oh that's right, it's a load of crap.

Re:Bell curve

[Samschnooks]

Bell curve, eh. So what attribute are we plotting the distribution of? Oh that's right, it's a load of crap.

It's a known fact that black drives are "smarter" than drives of other colors. Drives made in Asia are smarter than drives made in the Americas or in Europe.

The tests and the subsequent statistics don't lie!

Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously?

[Gat0r30y]

itâ(TM)s not possible to make incremental backups, nor to schedule them.

Yes, I want to buy a 1 TB drive, which cannot make incremental backups. That is quite a ways outside of the "bell curve" as long as by "bell curve" you mean "it has standard features that virtually any useful external storage solution provides".

Re:Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's a limitation of their software, not the drive.

Re:Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously?

[theJML]

tar, cpio, and dump do incremental backups... and they're easily scheduled with cron jobs...

Just saying...

Re:Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously?

[Gat0r30y]

You have a valid point, but still most every other external drive solution comes with backup software that includes incremental backup.

Re:Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously?

[snicho99]

Hrmm.. Yes I want to buy a 1TB drive because I'm about to capture 3 hours of HD footage for a project I'm working on. In fact I want to buy several. Most of the files going on to a disk like that are going to be tens of gigabytes, write once, read many. Incremental backup is so far from my mind it doesn't even register. Besides, the operating system supplies those tools anyway.(rsync rdiff - or even just "time machine"). To be honest in almost every other post production or graphic design studio that I've been in in the last 3 years has used laCie drives almost exclusively. I don't know why (maybe because they're pretty?), but if it's their target market then it seems they can get away without offering incremental backup software, just fine. And charge a premium for it. Note: this is not an endorsement of laCie products - just an observation. my 2c.

Re:Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

We, as a group, can't help it if you a are fucking moron.

However, as a group, can lobby a hardware/software companies for additional features. Though, the entity we lobby for cannot be a fucking moron.

Seems like you're out of luck, chump.

Re:Lacie - No Incrimental Backup? Seriously?

[richlv]

"lack of adequate backup software" - really ?
i applaud lacie for not spending their money on another crappy software that will become obsolete in few years. backup software, especially consumer level, has become a commodity quite some time ago.
i like lacie as a company so far, they even were listed as a supporter of k3b some time ago - wondering why they disappeared ;)
i have to admit that seeing them listed as the good guys on the k3b page motivated me to purchase overe time 4 (so far) external hdd products from them :)

G-raid mini

[Space cowboy]

I've been using a G-RAID mini for a year or so. The drive I have is only 500GB, but it's fast (for a portable drive) because of the RAID.

There's a 1TB drive coming out soon - see the 'mini-2', which looks to be $699 before any discount (I got ~25% on the mini IIRC).

G-Raid is also a *lot* more reliable than Lacie, in my experience but I guess YMMV, one view is not statistically relevant etc. etc.

Simon

Re:G-raid mini

[Henry V .009]

I spec'd out a external RAID solution for backups the other week. Several two-drive setups with eSATA are available for less than $200 on Newegg (no drives included). So for $500 dollars I could put together 1.5 Terabytes of mirrored storage (3 Terabytes striped). There are cheaper JBOD setups, but they aren't what I'm looking for.

I wound up buying a simple 1 Terabyte drive + enclosure instead for $100.

Re:G-raid mini

[Zerth]

I just got a Storbox5 bay eSATA box(bring your own drives) for $200, so-so 2 port esata RAID card included.

I don't particularly trust the hardware raid card, but I wasn't planning on using the computer for anything else, so I've got it softraided. The fans are damn noisy, though.

Re:G-raid mini

[value_added]

I don't particularly trust the hardware raid card ...

Finally, some common sense. Even if you could trust the RAID card and the rest of the circuitry, your data, if stored in anything other than a simple mirror configuration, is tied to the unit. No different than a RAID card of course.

These units do seeem to fill a largely unmet need, and while they offer lots in the area of convenience, I'd suggest they're a poor bargain given the uncertainties and potential for losing one's data. Too bad really. Building your own going the mini-ITX route isn't much better.

Re:G-raid mini

[Zerth]

Don't get me wrong, the box itself seems decent, other than the cheap noisy fans. Takes up a lot less space & wattage than a barebones ITX just for it.

I've just heard enough horror stories of having to find the exact same build/firmware combo if the card should go and it was "bundled"(literally, stuffed under the styrofoam) for the same price I've seen other places selling just the enclosure. If I needed hardware raid performance instead of just more drive bays, I'd use a card I could buy locally that cost a sawbuck or two.

The title is right.

[XPeter]

This is excessive. At home I have my two 160GB Seagate hard drives and an 8GB flash drive which I use when I'm on the go. What tom's has here is extremely overdone. This is just waste.

Re:The title is right.

[Linuxmonger]

I still run off of a 32MB Hayes Hard Card, in a 486DX266 with Vesa bus, your 160GB drive and 8GB flash are a waste.

Re:The title is right.

[Red Flayer]

This is excessive. At home I have my two 160GB Seagate hard drives and an 8GB flash drive which I use when I'm on the go. What tom's has here is extremely overdone. This is just waste.

Obviously, you have not been collecting porn long enough. Especially HD porn.

Re:The title is right.

[DarkOx]

Welcome to the IT industry as a whole for the last 5 years or so. Rather then devote even once moment of mental energy into deciding what to keep and what will never be needed again, or if {insert} is really the most efficent algorithm we just throw hardware at it.

IT is no fun any more it used to be about finding good solutions to problems; now its just about waste because you can also buy faster/denser hardware cheaper then you can pay someone to use their head.

Re:The title is right.

[Dragonslicer]

IT is no fun any more it used to be about finding good solutions to problems; now its just about waste because you can also buy faster/denser hardware cheaper then you can pay someone to use their head.

No, it's just about solving different problems now. Many people would argue that the new problems are much more interesting to solve.

Re:The title is right.

[brackishboy]

Sadly, replying to this means I can't use a mod point on it, but then there's no entry in the drop-down menu for '+1 Getoffmylawn'.

Re:The title is right.

[jonaskoelker]

you can also buy faster/denser hardware cheaper then you can pay someone to use their head.

Yeah, but the cheaper hardware won't do as much independent thinking. You will. Go and tell you manager that ;-)

Another way of doing it..

[CdBee]

I lug an Acer netbook around - the files I am most likely to need are on it, and ALL my files are accessible from it as I use online backup (Jungledisk). I keep a USB key to get files between systems in a hurry. Why copy everything in a world where in the circles people like us inhabit, connectivity is almost-ubiquitous?

Re:Another way of doing it..

[Walpurgiss]

Some people maybe have to back up rather large sets of data. Piles of CAD drawings, raw video edits, renders... Some stuff is too large or numerous to fit on just a laptop, USB key, or online storage.

Just my guess. I can't imagine how much it would suck to try to do an online backup of 500GB.

Re:Another way of doing it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Some stuff is too large or numerous to fit on just a laptop

You can get half-terabyte laptop drives for just over $100 each, and 17" or larger laptops can take 2 drives. What files are you using that take up more than a terabyte?

Re:Another way of doing it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us have relatives that live in the countryside (no starbucks wireless access points) and who have locked down wired internet connections (only their company PC can get access to the internet). :-(

Re:Another way of doing it..

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Mikrotik router with a PPTP VPN and I ssh tunnel the VPN then am able to access any file I need, and if it is too large to transfer in a minuet I VNC to my desktop which has about 2TiB in 4 drives(250GiB, 320GiB, 500GiB, 1TiB). (Of course all of my "desktop machines" are actually 4U rack mounted computers)

Re:Another way of doing it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed!

The chick that I'm bangning lives in Amish Land, PA. She's only on 56K. Worms and such don't care how fast the Internet connection is, they'll infect a computer and she'll lose all her stuff just the same. I bring updated virus defs on my flash drive whenever I go over there. Sad, I know, but it's the truth none-the-less. :-/

Flash Memory Software Requirements

[LowlyWorm]

I don't think software requirements are keeping up with the newer hardware. True, I am writing this from FireFox installed on my flash drive but there is often very little consideration by many software developers for the needs of the portable software market. So much of it expects data on c: or writes to the registry. Since flash memory quality benchmarks are based on number of read/writes before failure it will be interesting to see how the newer USB hardware will stand up particularly with applications such as browsers and email that do extensive read/write operations.

Re:Flash Memory Software Requirements

[jvin248]

don't worry about c: and registers... install one of many versions of Linux to your flash drive and have a full portable OS and software like open office and firefox. leave a portion of the drive open to save files and settings. Or get fancy and put in persistence.

Re:Flash Memory Software Requirements

[LowlyWorm]

I would but I read somewhere that flipping the removable bit on San Disk flash drives is unpredictable (it could ruin them).

Re:Flash Memory Software Requirements

[khellendros1984]

What exactly are you referring to? What "removable bit"?

Re:Flash Memory Software Requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the registry?

Re:Flash Memory Software Requirements

[hairyfeet]

I agree about having portable software, which is why I love checking out the portable freeware collection since they always seems to have something new. Being in PC repair I have also found having the computer repair utility toolkit on a flash to be invaluable.

Now as for how many read/writes you are going to get with your apps, why use your main drive for apps? When there is places like surplus computers where you can pick up multipacks of sticks so cheap, and the things are so small on your keyring, it just doesn't make much sense to me to waste read/write cycles on my large flash when I can just pick up a pack cheap. That way if the one I am using for an app on a stick dies, who cares? Just reach in the drawer and grab another one. Slap the apps on and I'm good to go. I just use FEBE to keep my FF bookmarks synced with my Netbox once a day and I'm good.

But with multipacks being so cheap and the things being so handy it just doesn't make sense to me to wear out my big drive using it for apps when I can have a handful of new drives in a drawer ready to go. After all, portable apps aren't bloated. Plus having spare means that I can try different things like Live USB OSes without risking screwing up the ones I use for work. Better safe than sorry.

Re:Flash Memory Software Requirements

[LowlyWorm]

Older computers like mine will not boot from flash drives. One way around this is flipping the removable bit. This bit tells the OS that the drive is removable. Once the bit is flipped the OS treats the drive as non-removable so it can boot from it at start up. This can be done via software.

Re:Flash Memory Software Requirements

[LowlyWorm]

I already subscribe to the Portable Freeware Collection newsletter. Another good resource is Portable Apps. They offer lots of open source programs via SourecForge. The Foxmarks plug-in for FF is good for updating bookmarks too.

"Excessive" Storage?

[blcamp]

There's no such thing.

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[lofoforabr]

There's no such thing.

That's something I learned during my years with computers. Everytime I get my hands on storage I'll "never be able to fill", I usually find that my definition of "never" is not what we see in dictionaries :)

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[Lord Ender]

Yeah, "hours of uncompressed 1080p video" really is the most important storage metric now, and there are no products which provide enough of that for any conceivable scenario.

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[pmarini]

in the early 90s a professor at the University where I was studying asked his class to write an essay on whether 1TB would be enough to store the entire collection of written publications for the foreseeable future...
granted: the w.w.web had not been invented yet and neither was the DVD so if "publications" would have stuck to plain text that could have been acceptable... but the advent of digital cameras, music and film collections (Netflix, LoveFilm, ...) and He knows what the future has for us, I guess data storage needs are quickly approaching infinity-bytes (shall I hereby coin the unit IB ?)

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[mdf356]

If the internets tell me right, uncompressed 1080p uses about 5GB/s of video, so 18TB per hour.

A 3 node Isilon IQ 36NL cluster would therefore have enough storage for 4.8 hours of such video at 80% usage. And that's the smallest cluster you could get; a 144 node cluster of those bad boys would store over 230 hours (at 80% usage). Admittedly, 230 hours probably isn't enough for someone.

(Yeah, I'm pimping my company's products; I just want to point out that there does exist something that can store hours of uncompressed 1080p video).

Though why you'd store it uncompressed, since usually bandwidth is much more limited than CPU time for uncompression...

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[Narnie]

Everytime I get my hands on storage I'll "never be able to fill", I usually find that my definition of "never" is not what we see in dictionaries :)

I tried to explain my definition of "never" to my ex-gf in regards to storage/cheating-on-gf. She wasn't too happy about the 3-4 month time frame.

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

uncompressed 1080p uses about 5GB/s of video

I don't think so. It's not nearly that much.

1080p24 at 24 bits of color is (1920*1080*24*24 /8/1024/1024 = 142 MB/s) which is only 500 GB per hour.

1080p60 at 48 bits of color is (1920*1080*60*48 /8/1024/1024 = 712 MB/s) which is only 2.4 TB per hour.

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

huh?

1920 * 1080 * 60 (fps) * 3 (YUV444 colorspace) = 356 MB/s, or 1,250 GB for an hour.

that amount of storage is easy to come by, though writing 350 MB/s sustained is a different matter.

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where the 5GB/s come from, but over here, a single frame of 1080p video has about 2 MPixels, so that's about 6MB/frame at 8bit depth. If you really need 16 bit, that would be 12MB/frame, at 60 frames per second that would be 720MB/s, but 24f/s and 8 bit would cut that down to 144MB/s.

normal bell curve

[Anonymous Coward]

the normal bell curve

As opposed to the abnormal bell curve?

"Excessive Portable Storage"

[rthille]

You say that and I think of a C-5A Galaxy full of 2TB drives...

Re:"Excessive Portable Storage"

[Anonymous Coward]

Google? Is that you?

Re:"Excessive Portable Storage"

[Pope]

Great bandwidth, horrible latency.

Re:"Excessive Portable Storage"

[Anonymous Coward]

Really noisy enclosure.

I want potable storage

[jollyreaper]

Drink it down, let it circulate, comes back out none too different. Guess I'll be using budweiser as the base then.

Let me tell you about excessive...

[Anonymous Coward]

The real excessive part is another million-page billion-ad Tom's Hardware article, where "Printable View" requires registration. Fantastic.

"Normal Bell" curve?

[orkybash]

You mean the new distribution recently discovered by the department of redundancy department?

USB limits uses, but otherwise

[derGoldstein]

Considering how much flash memory costs both in its usb-key version and the various cards, the only real reason I can see for considering the devices mentioned here would be transfer speed. If all you have to work with is USB2, I'd just "break it up" into 2 cards/keys (which, in the case of 64Gb or less, you can do).

What I really see appealing about these, however, is the ability to install portable apps that actually take up significant amounts of space. If you're hooking it up using Firewire or SATA then you can move your "working area" around with you from one machine to another, and work at full speed. This is obviously great with any type of multimedia files, as was mentioned above, but also with large, multi-language development environments. You can carry a ton of compilers/frameworks/parsers, along with libraries (including their sources), and have your choice of IDEs and helper programs installed all in one place. Clearly you'll want to back this up as often as possible, but you can easily automate that.

Re:USB limits uses, but otherwise

[Krishnoid]

If all you have to work with is USB2, I'd just "break it up" into 2 cards/keys (which, in the case of 64Gb or less, you can do).

I've wondered why flash drive manufacturers don't RAID two chips into one thumb-drive for performance. Corsair and others have flash drives with 30MB/s read speed; RAIDing two together in one device would provide 60MB/s, USB2's maximum theoretical performance, wouldn't it?

Re:USB limits uses, but otherwise

[tepples]

You can carry a ton of compilers/frameworks/parsers, along with libraries (including their sources), and have your choice of IDEs and helper programs installed all in one place.

Provided that 1. they're made available in portable versions, 2. they're made available for all operating systems installed on PCs that you plan to use, and 3. the PCs that you plan to use don't have USB mounted noexec.

Re:USB limits uses, but otherwise

[Zerth]

That's essentially what SSDs are.

Re:USB limits uses, but otherwise

[derGoldstein]

I was referring to situations in which you have reasonable access and the OS is known in advance. Also, I wouldn't do this at all with USB, I don't really think it's sufficient when you're using part of the drive you're executing programs from as scratch space for the IDE/compiler, which is probably what you would do in this situation. I pointed out SATA/Firewire for something like this.

As for the programs, you're right, this wouldn't work with Visual Studio. But the program doesn't have to be "portable" in the PortableApps.com sense, it just needs to be developed by sane people who don't use stuff like the registry.

Suppose you use various dynamic languages. Get parsers for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby (if you must), etc., and just place them in predictable locations. Then "install" Eclipse/Komodo/Komodo-Edit/whathaveyou if you're into heavier IDEs, or VI/VIM/EMACS if you're into S&M.

If you're a web developer (is there any other type these days? I forget...), install Apache and probably MySQL, and if this is intended for windows, then you could go the WAMP route. Then throw in every web browser around for good measure.

If you're a Java programmer, well, the list is too long for this post.

The LaCie is overpriced

[adisakp]

If you want a 1TB external drive, you can get an external 3.5" drive @ $100 that is faster for about $500 less than the LaCie @$599 -- or you could get 6 of them for the same price.

They both require an external power-adapter and both are about the same size (LaCie has two 2.5" drives which ends up about the same size and weight as a single 3.5" drive).

Now that's excessive!

[dazedNconfuzed]

1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter.

A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes.
The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec.
Now THAT'S bandwidth!

Re:Now that's excessive!

[Fulcrum of Evil]

once you consider the time to clear airport security and sort/hook up all those disks, I bet the BW is closer to 100T/s with 6+ hours latency. Damn, but that's a lot of porn.

Re:Now that's excessive!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, but that's a lot of porn.

Would you really want to wait six hours? I think you would take care of bizniz way before then.

Re:Now that's excessive!

[gregorio]

1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter. A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes. The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec. Now THAT'S bandwidth!

The bandwidth will never be larger than half the rated speed of a single drive * the number of drives being read in parallel. Why? Because you have to write TO the drives before departure and read FROM the drives after arrival.

Re:Now that's excessive!

[Alan426]

At $10,000/hour operating costs, that's only $0.064 (USD) per terrabyte. Not bad.

Re:Now that's excessive!

[totally bogus dude]

you have to write TO the drives before departure and read FROM the drives after arrival.

Not if you invent time travel first! Anyone know how many litres the TARDIS holds?

Re:Now that's excessive!

[haploc]

You got an RFC for that?

wither plain text?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they could not store documents in plain text?

Re:wither plain text?

[Applekid]

So they could not store documents in plain text?

You haven't lived until a user emails you a Word document with an embedded screen capture of a pdf viewer viewing a document that once existed as a Word document.

Re:wither plain text?

[El_Oscuro]

Just got one of those today. Though most of my users send a word document with a screen print of a PDF of with a screen print of the output from a command prompt.

I just made one for less than 400$ canadian!

[A little Frenchie]

how funny, I just bought http://www.addonics.com/products/enclosures/AE25RDESU.asp (build-in raid hardware support) and 2x 500gb seagate 5400.6 disk to make my own portable device for less than 400$ canadian, tax and shipping included, lot cheaper than the Lacie one! I will receive everything next Monday so I could do my own test and I will compare them. I never looked for pre-build one before doing my search.

Re:I just made one for less than 400$ canadian!

[WoollyMittens]

I have that thing. Filled with two 250GB drives striped. The eSata works really really well.

What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[CopaceticOpus]

Who in the world is this LaCie external drive made for? It has 2 500GB drives included, which can be run as RAID 0 or RAID 1. For the $600 price tag, I could purchase 5-6 external 1TB drives.

These things are most likely being used to store music and videos. I almost feel bad for all the people who buy one of these, set it to RAID 0, and then cry in a year or two when one of the drives die and they lose their data. If they had used the money to purchase backup drives instead, they would be fine.

The only possible advantage is speed, but the speed just isn't needed except for special applications, in which case it would be better to simply build a computer.

Here's the craziest thing about the $600 price tag - I could build an entire new computer running Linux, with a software RAID setup and twice the storage, for less money.

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[Space cowboy]

And if you use it like I use my G-Raid-mini, taking it with you as the storage for your portable when on photography trips, you'd be the one with the backache, and I'd be strolling around with .5T in my jacket pocket.

Same old fallacy: Just because *I* can't use it means that *you* can't use it. Just not true...

Simon

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[rusl]

Nonsense, Netbooks are cheep and putting a 320GB 2.5" in them is standard, in a few months 500GB will be just as cheap... And with a netbook you have the speed of the mainboard sata rather than usb or enchanced usb... plus you got the system already running so you don't need to setup the computer to use the data. I guess there might not be room for RAID in a tiny netbook but... I just lost 800GB due to RAID problems, external backup is what you need not redundant problems.

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need a RAID drive for storing photos?

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[Space cowboy]

Because each photo is ~70MB, and I take several thousand on a shoot. Leaf digital backs are fantastic, but the photos take up space. Thank [insert deity] for the way Aperture handles image-adjustments...

I want speed (which two RAID drives gives me) because transferring all those files from cards to dual disks, and then actually rough-cutting them is a major time sink. The Mini-G's have firewire-800 as their interface, so you get to see the benefits of both disks.

I want capacity (which two RAID drives gives me) for all the obvious reasons.

I don't need long-term reliability - all the photos are mirrored onto two of these mini-G drives, and then burnt onto DVD by my assistant when I get back anyway.

Simon.

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[Space cowboy]

Are you fecking serious ? That's not even wrong!

How does using a netbook help me store huge quantities of large RAW images when using Aperture ? Are you seriously suggesting I use a networked filesystem, or something ? If you are, I'm speechless.

Even if it weren't a stupid idea, using *one* drive (and an internal one at that!) is an amateur's mistake. You copy the photos off the card simultaneously to at least two hard drives (that's two mini-G's, not one mini-G with two disks inside). You burn the images to optical (DVD, Blu-ray,...) soon afterwards.

The mini-G is firewire-800, it's plenty fast enough, and it mates nicely with the Macbook Pro that's running Aperture.

Simon.

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[rusl]

I think you just proved the point that what you're talking about is a pretty esoteric specialised application - not the general use storage system that the article is talking about.

For most people's usage having a tiny portable computer with the tiny portable drive (and 500GB isn't a big deal these days) is probably more convenient.

The majority of "Photographers" are posting their shots on flickr or something like that anyway.

Sounds like you want specialised (Some say overpriced) professional equipment.

Wikipedia of Aperture says it's an apple RAW photography application. And G-RAID is therefore an apple specific bunch of aluminum external harddrives. With Firewire. I see something similar (but maybe requires plugging in but has the added feature of hot-swap) http://hub.pricecanada.com/detail.php?product_id=477188&sku=DS2320DBK for $150 plus 2x1T($100) drives and your still at only $350. I guess dropping $600 is worth the convenience if you can write it all off as a business expense. But have 2 of them to copy at the same time? How is that not just added complexity. I guess at that level of paranoia $1200 isn't too much. Especially if you think Apple products are "worth it".

Took apart my Father's old 386 that was living in the basement and the 40MB HDD had a $600 price tag. I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[Space cowboy]

I think you just proved the point that you didn't read my parent's post... I was originally responding to:

Who in the world is this LaCie external drive made for?

As for your comparison

• The G-Raid mini isn't Apple-specific. The device has usb-2 as well as firewire 4/800 ports.
• The one you suggest is 9.5" x 6" x 3" (compared to 5.875" x 3.25" x 1.5") or ~6x as bulky
• Yours is not bus-powered, so I can't take it into the field. Not many AC power-points halfway up a volcano when you need to clear space on the CF cards...
• It comes from the manufacturer of drives which have served me well in the past, not the cheapest knock-down price you can find on the internet. It looks and feels well-engineered, and they have performed very well in very demanding environments for around a year now.

In short, your choice is useless to me. This isn't a matter of thinking 'Apple products are "worth it"', it's a matter of finding something that's good for the job. I don't see any problem with that.

As for "paranoia", if I'm sent on a shoot, the cost of an extra drive is negligible - literally lost in the noise - and it may not even be possible to re-obtain the photograph. If it's the Beijing olympics that you're covering, you can't really ask them to do it again if your hard-drive dies... People seem to object to having to get married again as well...

Pretty much any serious software allows you to copy from one card to multiple destinations - and by your definition using that feature makes most of the photographers I know "paranoid". Hmm, perhaps they're all wrong and you're right. Perhaps.

Simon.

Re:What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[rusl]

Relax, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying your usage is atypical because not very many people are covering the Beijing Olympics or have the costs of hardware is "lost in the noise." You're right that you answered the original post of who uses it. I'm saying that lots of people wouldn't.

Anyway, re-reading the thread you are continuing to argue your original point about "Just because *I* can't use it means that *you* can't use it. " Which I was never disputing (because it seems to be a self evident maxim for one thing)

I was disagreeing about the backache. My netbook is light and i can do with it the types of things more people want to do with portable storage. For you, you can hire sherpas to carry all the extra redundant drives (!4 of them in 2 doubles?) because as you said the cost is irrellevant to you but not for most people and not for everyone who gets backaches.

Enjoy!

Pencil Sharpener?

[Luthair]

Come on, I can't be the only person who thought the image on the first page had a built in pencil sharpener.

LaCie has wierd marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

2 years ago I bought a LaCie 1TB for $150, has a standard network connection and web page configuration for its SAMBA server that produces letter drives for Win. Sort of a NSLu2 on steroids. I plugged it into my wireless router and it streams burned DVDs and youtube videos.

With Leopard tweaks, it will work with TimeMachine. It's just a Linux box that's so simple even a schoolteacher could set it up.

Why they dropped this line I'll never know.

NAS?

[cdn-programmer]

Will any of these drives run as network attached storage? If so can they run OpenBSD?