Slashdot Mirror
WD Launches 3 Terabyte HD
MojoKid writes "Today, Western Digital announced the world's highest density hard drive, as they reach the 3TB mark with their newest, 5th generation Caviar Green product. The Caviar Green 3TB serves up a super-sized combination of reduced power consumption, lower operating temperature, and a quieter operation. Unfortunately, if you're still using Windows XP, don't expect your system to make full use of any 3TB drive (yet). The problem is that older operating systems, in combination with a legacy BIOS and master boot record (MBR) partition table scheme, face a barrier at 2.19TB. Existing motherboards utilizing BIOS (non-UEFI), GPT ready operating systems like Windows 7 64-bit, and appropriate storage class drivers, can address the entire capacity of hard drives larger than 2.19TB. Another issue is that a number of host bus adapter (HBA) and chipset vendors don't offer driver support for these types of drives. To provide a solution for this compatibility issue, Western Digital bundles an HBA with the Caviar Green 3TB drive that allows the operating system to use a known driver to correctly support extra large capacity drives. This solution is reportedly just temporary until the rest of the industry catches up."
Into space?
Definately cool. Seems like we were stuck at that 2TB size for way too long. On the other hand, it DID result in a rare case of the largest drive capacity being your best bang for your buck. I'm sure for a while these 3TB drives will be more expensive. Still, I was looking at building a new RAID6 NAS box using 2TB drives pretty soon. If the prices are reasonable, I might opt for the 3TB drives instead. 5 of these setup as a RAID6 should yield enough storage space to tie me over for quite a while.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Good for you. In the last year, I've put about 8.5 TB into my house (without a single torrent) and I could use another 3 TB. Running a small recording studio digitally has it's upsides and downsides.
A 5x 3TB Raid 6 sounds just about right for a nice 9TB assembly. (And yes, I know, Raid isn't a backup, there's tapes for that.)
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
If you make SATA controllers, and you didn't see 3TB coming coming years in advance, you need to get the hell out of the hardware business. You are incompetent. Go find another line of work.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
That's even more data loss to worry about when it goes wrong :) I like my RAID array, but if I didn't have it I'd be afraid of using a single huge drive.
Combined storage in my house is maybe ~2.5TB. That's 4 machines + external storage. I'm no where near filling it up and my wife has been torrenting all our television for over a year.
All depends on your needs. The combined storage space in my house is close to 12TB. Most of the drives are full and I'm constantly having to copy things around to make space for new stuff. The fact that my entire DVD library has been ripped to AVI files (including television season/series sets) helps eat up a lot of that though.
Helps a lot in that I have a 1.9-year old niece who comes over all the time wanting to watch Elmo, Charlie Brown, and various other Disney movies. She actually knows how to work the DVD player herself, but she's not exactly careful with the discs (my Finding Nemo disc is now completely unplayable :'(), but in the interest of making sure my discs don't all die horrible deaths, they're now being streamed from a MythTV server . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
This means that soon the 1 and 2 TB drives will be cheaper. I was waiting for this to upgrade my external storage.
It appears Seagate beat them. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148580&cm_re=3tb-_-22-148-580-_-Product
Can all fish swim?
Too bad it's WD - hope these don't have the huge failure rate (2 of 19) that our last bunches have been having.
Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
"This solution is reportedly just temporary until the rest of the industry catches up."
But by then, they will have a Petabyte drive and they will have to catch up to that too.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I think Ken Thompson said, "The steady state of disks is full". No matter how big drives get, you'll eventually fill it up. At which point you'll need a bigger one, or you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time (any really) moving shit around and deciding what to delete.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Other members of the Green line have an "Intellitpark" feature that can destroy the drive in a matter of months for certain workloads (like using linux). Any word on if WD has fixed that for these?
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=73573
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2008/4/10/1396844
Anyone stuck one of these into a Time Capsule yet? I assume it won't have any problem utilizing all 3TB
You don't really have to put it IN a Time Capsule. You can just have the drive in a USB enclosure and attach it to the USB port on the Time Capsule.
You can also attach a drive to the Airport Extreme base station and it will be available over the network for Time Machine backups.
Reminds me of when ATA66/100/133 came out and in order to take advantage of the new larger HDs you needed a new controller. Maxtor kindly bundled one with their drives. Made it very easy to upgrade existing/old machines until enough new motherboard chipsets included support for the updated protocol.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
and what do you do with these torrents? hoard them?
i DVR a bunch of cartoons for my eldest son and keep the 3 latest ones. my wife DVR's a few shows and erases them after she watches them. i also have netflix for a few other cartoons and stuff to watch.
what exactly is the point of hoarding TV shows? most of them you watch once and don't want to watch again. stuff like Friends and Everybody loves Raymond is constantly playing reruns
But the real question is does Windows 7-32 bit handle this drive? The summary stated Windows-7 64 bit...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
At least it's Western Digital, because Seagate drives sure suck lately (looks at the stack of dead Seagate drives).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
5ct/GB is too expensive for you?
Prices don't suddenly drop because of this announcement. I can't believe how they manage to make drives as inexpensive as they are.
that is what is eating up my 1TB drive atm, except it's my kids, not my niece.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
rip your dvds let me know how fast the storage goes then.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
My DVR alone has 2.5TB of space dedicated to it just for storing recordings.
It stores those recordings in h264, so I get much more recording time than with MPEG2.
Once you get into HD video, 3TB really isn't that much. Individual recordings can be 35G.
A few years of saving what you would have watched on cable can easily fill up several TB. This could be torrents or "purchases" from iTunes.
Apple really should have a home server of it's own by now just for this reason alone: DVD Jukebox for iTunes purchases.
Defaulting to network storage for other iTunes stuff would make a lot of sense too.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I remember when I had a 100MB hard drive and I thought; "I'll never fill this!". Then I had a 1GB hard drive and thought it would be impossible to fill. Now I have a 1TB drive and I am filling it. There will always be bigger and faster hard drives. One day we will look back at that new massive drive 3TB drive and think; "How did I ever deal with such a finite amount of space?"
Nothing to see here, move along...
That's external. This one's internal.
well with a DVR the content is playable before it finishes. With torrents it isn't. Also depending on your tracker there may be ratio requirements, which makes it a good idea to simply hang on to them for a while and let them seed.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
USB is slower than GigE. By putting your storage behind a USB controller you just killed your performance.
Although the Time Capsule might have had crap performance anyways.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This is great news for misers like me. I like to wait for the new stuff to show up so I can snatch up good deals on the 2nd or even 3rd gen stuff at great prices. Since the 1 TB drives are already getting really cheap, this just means that I might be able to get some 2TB drives even cheaper and get a deal on those 2TB WD Black drives with the 2 read heads that are supposedly great drives with a great warranty and not spend a ton.
What I want to know is: how can you justify the cost of tape? And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?
What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not? Assuming no significant sunk cost for tape hardware, you're still looking at similar if not greater costs per GB of tape storage as you would be disk, whether you're looking at LTO 3 or LTO 5. Throw in $1,000 to $3,000 for your standalone chassis tape drive... you'd have to burn through hundreds of single-use 1.5TB hard drives to justify tape on cost (and even then, questionably - tape is more expensive per raw GB than drives).
The whole 'raid isn't backup' argument seems a misnomer to me these days. Yes, bad backup practices make tape less reliable, but it's much more difficult to put good practices in place for effective tape backup than it is for hard disks. With filesystems like ZFS (with CoW and a number of other nice features that make tape further irritating in comparison), I don't see the point at all.
No, raid isn't a backup in and of itself - but neither is a single tape. A raid5 live copy of your data with periodic/daily/whatever diffentials to external drive, however, seems like a pretty good backup to me.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You're backing up 8+ TB onto tape? What kind of tapes and drive? I always thought the only practical way of backup up multi-TB drives was with other multi TB drives.
volume is kinda meaningless given data is stored on flat platters. Only the surface area on platters are used.
A 2.5" platter has about 40% of the surface area compared to 3.5" platter.
If data was stored 3 dimensionally then maybe volume would matter.
With ever increasing densities on the platters, doesn't that just mean if there's a malfunction like a HDD head crash, you lose more data?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
old OS can't see the whole thing? That's not really a problem. No more then saying my dos 3.3 can't see 1T.
Not that many people need 3T. yeah yeah, save me your 'people will use the space they have' argument. It doesn't hold up to reality.
\
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
rip your dvds let me know how fast the storage goes then.
OK Just ripped all my DVDs and they take up 0GB. I do not want to re-watch anything enough for it to be worth buying.
I suspect not. Why does it matter?
Why would you put a 3TB drive in a 5-year-old+ computer? There haven't been 32bit x86 machines on the market (as 'new product') for several+ years now, and only then on netbooks and laptops. Anything capable of running Windows 7 will, in all likelihood, be using a 64 bit processor.
If you're running 32 bit Windows 7, let me refer you to my previous post where I say "It's dead, Jim." There is no reason to do so unless it is archaic hardware (in which case - does it even have a SATA port?)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Because it is very possible that 2 or more drives can fail at the same time. Not probable but possible. If the data loss is not an issue then by all means do not have some other kind of backup. To many people the data loss is bad, so they do a backup.
Speaking from my own experience I have seen drives just go bad. They were not even hooked up. They worked one day, and were dead the next time they were used. I tried the hard drive as a backup solution. The hard drive (which was kept in an anti static bag when ever it was not being used) just died. Instead of one backup, I now have at least 3 external backups of important things.
I think that's almost entirely due to everybody storing their own copies. Searching the BluRay store at amazon.com I get 9352 titles. If we assume 50 GB/disc - some are smaller, some are duplicate versions and some are multi-disc sets but not too far off - then that's 500 TB. Is that much? It's 133 of these drives, and that'd store pretty much all high-def content produced to date. It's out of the league of a home server but if there was such a thing as Spotify for movies it would be a piece of cake. If we'd all stream our video the reason most people buy TB-size discs would be gone. Yes, I know there are exceptions but those are exceptions.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The issue is most people saying "I got a RAID" ONLY have a raid.
So maybe it is better phrased that ONLY a RAID isn't a backup. The issue is if you only have a single copy of your data no matter how redundant the method of storing that single copy can become corrupt.
Having a drive (or RAID) and a backup RAID provides a high level of fault tolerence and may make sense where cost of tape storage is simply not warranted.
Even better would be:
storage RAID
backup RAID
offsite backup (via cloud)
The problem is many users will take a 2TB drive RAID it and the files stored there are the only copy. That isn't a backup it is merely a more fault tolerant method of primary storage.
What I want to know is: how can you justify the cost of tape? And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?
The whole 'raid isn't backup' argument seems a misnomer to me these days.
You're actually arguing with yourself. 'RAID' isn't a backup, it provides fault tolerance for uptime.
A separate and off-site storage target is a valid backup. In fact, most tapes are being replaced with "virtual tape" which is nothing more than disk backed RAID storage located in a different area than the source data.
Stop confusing RAID (within a single storage array) and a separate storage array that also happens to be RAID.
Your only option is an autoloader which isn't cheap.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840119028
Single LTO 3 drive plus 8 tape magazine. 3.2TB capacity (6.4TB w/ compression YMMV)
Yeah, but why? It sounds like you have hundreds of hours of video stored locally. Do you really watch that much tv?
Unfortunately these are Western Digital "Green" drives. Speaking as someone who works at a company that sells RAID devices, their Green drives suck for RAID. They're slow (they're usually not even 5400 rpm), and they like to timeout and drop out of the RAID frequently. We saw this same scenario when 2TB drives were released and only the low-speed/low-power drives were available at the beginning. We'll have to wait a few months before proper 3 TB drives are out there.
and what do you do with these torrents? hoard them?
i DVR a bunch of cartoons for my eldest son and keep the 3 latest ones.
Now that he's 30 he should consider moving out of your basement and getting his own DVR.
I'm on the same situation. I wonder why no one build big fat drives with lots of capacity, I would definitely buy a 5 1/4 bay hard drive of, say, 6 TB or more.
While I agree with you on XP- Cheap desktops, and most (all?) current windows netbooks are running 32-bit Win7. It's not going away any time soon.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Yeah, but why? It sounds like you have hundreds of hours of video stored locally. Do you really watch that much tv?
Buying a few terabytes of disk space is much easier than convincing your girlfriend that she really didn't need to watch that episode of CSI Milton Keynes from last March that you just deleted.
OK so many PCs won't see it but how bout my quad G5? Where does my late firmware top out?
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
Can't we just split it into nice little 540MB partitions like we did back in the day?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
America, Home of the Brave.
However that limitation is dubious at this point.
Windows 7 32 & 64 bit is supported (as is Vista 32 & 64)
Boot drive requires
compatible HBA
UEFI (instead of BIOS)
64 bit OS and compatible storage drivers
There are almost no UEFI compatible motherboards so booting from this disc is most systems is impossible.
Both 32 & 64 bit versions of 7 & Vista support this drive as secondary (non boot) drive.
Most people who buy a Time Capsule are getting it for the wifi backups anyway.
Because there is still software that doesn't run on 64 bit Windows of course.
I use such software daily in my work.
So it's not "dead, Jim."
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Honestly I find that I archive less and less.
Donated all my DVD (almost never watch them again) to charity (nice writeoff).
Quick what % of your DVD have you watched at least 10 times. Hell how many of them have you watched only once or twice?
Storing DVD is of dubious value IMHO. In 20-30 years it will be the digital equivelent of people who stored every single newspaper in case they needed.
With netflix, VOD (both from cable and online), hulu, itunes, redbox, etc the need to store TB of pre-generated content seems quaint.
Take the cost of the DVD + cost (in $ value of your time) of ripping them + cost to archive them divided by number of uses. If it is more than $2 - $3 a view you are paying more than just paying per use.
Now people w/ lots of personal unique content (family photos, video, original composistions, personal files, etc) storage makes sense. One can't simply go to a redbox pay $2 and get a copy of last summer vacation video.
I was working at a government research center in the 90s. Their main server had a 4 drive raid 1 array. One day there was an emergency shutdown because 3 drives suffered near-simultaneous head crashes. I think nobody told the IT guy you are supposed to make sure all your RAID drives came from different batches. Either that or somebody kicked the damn thing and didn't own up to it ;) They did regular tape backups, too, so it wouldn't be the end of the world. Just maybe a day or two of work lost. Well, if you only use your network drive, rather than using your network drive as a backup ;)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I've never heard of anything other than 16 bit software that wouldn't run under Win7 64, but runs fine under Win7 32.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
And yes, I know, Raid isn't a backup, there's tapes for that.
Heh, shows how much you know... I run RAID-0.
$20 x 6 is $120. x2 (so I have an offline backup) $240.
Not enough to wait for but enough savings to make me decide it's time.
No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
you never had a girlfriend did you?
People, what a bunch of bastards
No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
One piece of advice I got given many years ago, "there is no such thing as a sane woman, just pick your insanity". Applies to men too don't get me wrong. If I can pick a woman who gets annoyed over weird TV programs I have no interest in I'll pick that any day over some of the stuff I've put up with over the years.
All that gross sexism over and done with a fairer version of the above advice would be people are different, even your best friend or life partner will piss you off about some weird stuff at time. It's ok, just remember you do it to them too.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Tapes are useful as a removable & portable media. RAID arrays generally are not as portable. The RAID array won't do me much good when my house burns down- off-site media is the protection in this case. Large external hard drives are a suitable substitute which MAY lower the $/GB of off-siting content in certain scenarios (relative to even the most recent tape tech). I've been using Hitachi G-Drives in place of LTO and have reduce the media cost.
3.5" drives are deeper, so you can (and manufacturers do) fit more platters in. So volume does matter in that context.
Amateur. :)
My fault-tolerant array is up to 12tb (14 if you count parity) with room to add another 14tb before I run out of ports and drive bays. On the one hand, it's nice to be able to grab most of my content off the Tivo and store it exactly as it was streamed by the cable company. On the other hand, 6+ gigs per hour really adds up fast.
What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not?
Generally speaking: transportability, reliability and longevity. Potentially performance, as well, depending on how you're connecting those "backup drives".
What about all that stuff you can't get on Netflix? All those episodes of MST3K and Doctor Who will likely never see a DVD release. It's important to have them mirrored on as many hard drives as possible, or we'll lose more than we already have.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Thank you for demonstrating why I prefer being single. If I can't have a girlfriend/wife who is laid back about stuff, I won't have one at all.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
One can't simply go to a redbox pay $2 and get a copy of last summer vacation video.
Not yet, that is... :p
Remember to maintain your supply of
If I stick one of these 3TB monsters into a NAS (as opposed to using the SATA cable directly into the computer), will Windows XP and Windows 7 32-bit be able to access the contents just fine - or will they too be stuck at 2.19TB until the patch is applied?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
My vote is that either someone kicked it, or they had a power issue.
4-way RAID1 is interesting... I thought I was being paraoid at 3-way RAID1. I figure, if I've got a 3-drive unit and the option of going 2-way RAID1 with a hot-spare vs 3-way RAID1 with no spare, I'll go for the latter. Which keeps my data safer instead of it being sitting on a single spindle while the hot-spare spins up and synchronizes. Things have to go really pear-shaped to lose 3 drives at once.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Face it... I haven't had to buy a new HD recently, so my largest is still only 1TB. And if you think about it, the new 3TB drives are going to be kind of spendy for another 6 month or so. But they will drive down the prices of the 2TB drives. I know what I'll be buying if I need more storage space in the immediate future.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
But his point still holds valid. If one wants a 3TB drive for a cheap desktop or any netbooks (which usually only hold a laptop HDD, anyway), then one might want to re-evaluate what they are trying to do.
I've never heard of anything other than 16 bit software that wouldn't run under Win7 64, but runs fine under Win7 32.
MS GP9, ADP eTime, lots of VB6 and .NET 1.x apps...
grep -iw skynet
As, I bought a 2TB WD Green on Saturday. ~:-) Couldn't help myself it was down to $99.99 (memory express).
a laid back girl surely isnt impossible, what is impossible is to find a girl who is rational about everything.
My girlfriend can be quite cool about a lot of stuff, and she takes a lot of weird stuff from me, but convincing her we dont need to keep every single movie we come across is not by any means easier then buying a few extra disks
People, what a bunch of bastards
In the past, I've always gone with the biggest single-platter drive I can get. Seems to work well as far as reliability goes.
Unfortunately, a lot of manufacturers seemed to have dropped that technical information from their websites. While you can sometimes figure out that various drive models are multiples of some value (indicating capacity of a single platter side), capacities are changing fast enough that it is no longer a reliable indicator -- I could very well being just looking at old stock from a previous density.
Anyone have a good way to tell how many platters/heads a drive has, before buying it?
I don't believe you can purchase a chassis with an externally accessible hard drive array, hard drives and carriages for the drives to emulate a tape changer for less money than you can purchase a large capacity tape changer and the equivalent storage in tapes.
If you're backing up a small office, home office or tiny corporate environment, then go for it, just use some externally accessible array that can export everything JBOD and manage the device by hand, but if you need more than a few drives to back things up, the overhead and maintenance cost would quickly outstrip the cost of the tapes, drive and tape changer.
at $0.0375 per GB for LTO4 tape, the hard drives aren't really cheaper either.
What I do is have a multi TB array used for disk-to-disk backups and as a cache for the disk-to-tape backups. Write the disk backups as virtual tapes, then shuffle off the virtuals to real tapes. That leaves the latest full backup and incremental on hard drive, and old backups on tape. Someone deletes a file, just restore it from hard drive backups. Someone deletes a file and realizes it was last week, recall the tapes and restore it from there if there is business justification for the added cost to retrieve one file.
As prices drop, and capacities increase, the solution to this equation changes to favor hard drives as tapes aren't increasing in capacity or decreasing in price to match hard drives.
Give it three years and then start grinding up your old tapes.
Are you aware that there are a number of good, free virtualization platforms available for you to use? This will allow you to natively run whatever crap it is that won't run on a 64 bit host, and you can actually make use of more than 2GB of memory effectively as a result.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Just crank the volume to 11!
Amen Brother, Amen. I'll drink to that!
Thanks, I'm already aware of that and have tried them all.
My industry's crappy software doesn't run on 64 bit windows and a single job can take 18 hours to run. Under a VM it of course takes longer.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Properly stored tape will last eons.
Hard drives will not.
That's not a problem for backups. It's a problem for archives, which are an entirely different (and immensely more compounded) issue.
apes are more durable.
Durable, compared to what?! Aside from being much more volatile than a drive to ESD, they're also not hermetically sealed. The plastic tape itself stretches, gets kinks, and can get stuck - even without improper physical operation.
Broken tapes are user-serviceable.
This is hardly a benefit, because - unless it's the only copy - you've got another set.
Proper backups entail 2 full revisions/data sets, differentials, and the live copy. At least. Short of your live systems, your daily/etc. differentials, as well as two full week data sets?
I'd also say it's debatable how 'user servicable' a tape is if it's been damaged, given the speed at which current tape systems move, the sensitivity of the electronics, and the relative density of the tape. It does not take much dirt or oil to damage your tape drive.
Data is far more recoverable from broken tape than from a broken hard drive.
Provided you write as a an unencrypted/uncompressed stream to the tape, yes. But then you're talking about half the data density that's advertised.
The costs you cite are ridiculous for a simple home setup.
Are they? They're not for the data amounts mentioned. an LTO3 tape (400GB) is $35+. An LTO5 tape (1.5TB) is over $110. Both are significantly more than hard drives of similar capacity, which have electronics to detect and correct media errors on the fly, giving you significantly better 'wiggle room'. Let's not forget that you've also got to buy a tape drive: find me one that's new and under $900 and worth putting in the role of 'backup'; I've yet to see one.
I read recently that drive plater errors occur roughly once every 2TB of transfered data. How often does a backup happen where the archive is corrupt and 'off by one'? I'm guessing it's somewhat more frequently than once every 2TB.
Tape backup is an epic fail when you're using large files or tapes smaller than your files; splitting archives across tapes significantly reduces the reliability of your backups.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm sure that would take a lot of space, but I can't imagine why I would want to do rip my DVDs onto my computer when they are already in a format that is easy to handle and compatible with my DVD player.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"And yes, I know, Raid isn't a backup"
No, but snapshots on RAID are, especially if that RAID is off-site. Personally I couldn't be bothered with stuff like tapes these days.
"they like to timeout and drop out of the RAID frequently."
If "green" means nearline, I think that's the point. Useful for backups I suppose, not for online, rapid access.
Try working in the physical security field. Until the latest release this year AMAG's access control software wouldn't even work in an Active Directory domain unless you installed it as a freaking DOMAIN ADMIN! Lenel's network video recorder software won't run under 64-bit, and I don't think that Milestone's will either. AMAG won't even install under SQL Server 2008, while Lenel's will but only if it's set for Compatibility Level 90. Open Options doesn't even recognize Windows 7 as a valid operating system, much less Server 2008 (and of course we know that Vista really wasn't).
Keep in mind these are the programs that secure your server room doors.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I've been using 8 x 2TB WD Green disks in RAID 5 (mdadm) on a JBOD controller for a while now and I've never had this happen. Maybe the controller keeps them spun up at all times or that WD has fixed it in firmware (since all these disks were manufactured in June 2010 or later). Either way, disks never drop out of the RAID and sequential read/write easily exceeds 300MB/s.
Actually, for the last 3 years or so, the data is actually stored on tiny magnetic towers on the platter: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/storage/2005/04/04/hitachi-announces-3d-hard-drive-revolution-39193673/
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Windows 7 32bit does not and likely will not support UEFI or GPT. MS feels these features are Enterprise-only, and All Enterprises Everywhere should be running x64.
MS's thoughts and words, not mine.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Perpendicular recording isn't 3D despite Hitachi lame attempt at buzz.
It simply made the surface area of each bit smaller by aligning the bits perpendicular to the surface.
Each platter is still 2D. There is no volume measurement. If you look at a platter you can "see" each bit they aren't stacked on top of each other (yet).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording
Most people don't have the 30-40mbps connections necessary to stream a single bluray title. Those that do are so heavily oversold, only a small percentage of their user base could be doing so at the same time. The only streaming service that could afford that kind of bandwidth consumption would be one co-located at your ISP.
Will society been that worse off missing some MST3K 30 years from now? I doubt it.
However I accept the point. The more esoteric the data the more useful archiving it becomes. If we had sane copyright laws most of that stuff would be in public domain and part of the cloud already (making individual backups even more useless).
In theory but not so much practice.
2.5" drives can hold 3 platters. Most 2.5" drives are 2 or 3 platters.
3.5" drives "CAN" hold up to 5 platters however yields tend to be poor, failure rates higher, and a 5 platter 1TB drive will be outperformed by a 3 platter 1TB drive (higher density). Thus in reality most 3.5" drives contain 2 or 3 platters.
Will society been that worse off missing some MST3K 30 years from now?
Yes. Yes it would.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm sorry, isn't this Slashdot? Why isn't anybody asking about Linux support?
A while ago, I read that Linux wasn't ready for 3TB drives yet. Is it now? Do we need 64bit Linux to use this, or is there a solution like PAE is to the 4GB memory limit?
Is the bundled HBA supported?
I'd love to use this disk to store multiple snapshots (rsnapshot) of my fileserver...
.sig: No such file or directory
Thecus have sold NAS boxes with hotswappable drives for a good number of years now starting at a few hundred dollars.
Something like the thecus N5200 will cost about $800 but give you five bays, hot spare, automatic rebuilding and hot swappable drives.
I kind of want to because when they're stored compactly (in boxes in the cabinet under the TV) I forget what I have. For the time being I've got the fileserver that the PS3 plays AVIs from set up with a pile of directories named after the DVDs I own, so I can go through the list, but having the actual video data online would let me move those boxes into a closet or the attic :)
As long as we are trading horror stories...
I had a fully redundant SAN go TU because of a bug in a redundant controller. One controller needed a new battery; on re installation of the controller an entire shelf died. Instantly. Ouch! Still, no problem at that point, because we set up our LUNs to stripe vertically across the shelves - so we could lose a shelf and not go down. That's when the controller started issuing wonky commands and corrupted the rest of the array. Wham, 64 spindles offline in less than a minute. Yeah, that was a great day...
So the lesson is, redundancy is to prevent you from needing a backup. Backups are for when that didn't work.
Since you mention backup to the cloud - does anyone have experience with cloud backup? I'm using a service from Terramark at work that is semi-reasonably priced for corporate services, but out of reach for the home.
At home I'm trying Carbonite, but there is a feature that I really don't like. The backup service from Carbonite only stores copies of files currently on your hard drive. If you delete a file, it goes away on the backup within two weeks. So if I screw up and delete something important and it takes me a couple of months to realize it - well, too bad. I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of situations where something got deleted and it wasn't noticed for a long time.
Anyone have a suggestion for a better online backup service?
I fail. I will fix my own mistake.
Hard drive companies often use term platter ambiguously.
A platter has two sides thus can two surfaces to access data from.
Sometimes they will refer to a disc as 4 platter meaning 4 physical platter and 8 surfaces. Sometimes as 4 platters meaning 4 surfaces and 2 platters.
2.5" drives tend to be 1 or 2 platters (up to 4 surfaces & heads).
3.5" drives tend to be 2 to 4 platters (up to 8 surfaces & heads). 5 platters & 10 heads aren't very common anymore.
Still this drive does appear to have the highest density of any physical disk so far.
3TB = / 8 heads-surfaces = 375GB per surface.
375GB * 8 / 4 square inches on 3.5"* drive = min areal density of 750Gb/in^2.**
* 3.5" drive actually have 3" platter roughly 4 square inches of surface area when you exclude the spindle.
** Areal density is likely higher due to short stroking and manufacture marketing rounding drive size to an expected size. i.e. no selling 3.27GB drives. However at a min it is 75Gb/i2 density.
It's a known issue not only on Windows 7 / Vista http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977178 but also on XP http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317272 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330100 - however the lastest incarnation of the flaw does not seem to get fixed for the older systems such as XP (or has anyone found a solution for this?), and Intel Matrix drivers as a workaround http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/50479-1-tb-wdc-black-fails-wake-sleep.html#6 require (and have their installer check for) one of a few specific boards.
I use iDrive. Not sure if there is a better service.
iDrive deletes deleted files from the backup also however it has an option to turn off automatic sync (which I do). When you manually sync it warns you of deleted files and asks what to do.
So if I accidentally delete a file I can restore local copy from the archive rather than delete archive to match local.
Sadly if you turn on auto-sync it won't warn or propt you (working very similar to carbonite except the "grace period" is 30 days).
I don't know if there is a better solution than I drive. It just happened to be what I used and it works for what I need.
kids. they watch the same movie over and over again. they also get the DVD grimy and break it. It also allows one to remove the DVD crap and just get to the movie.
This article makes it sound like having a 3T hard drive doesn't work with anything other than the latest and greatest HW. This is mostly BS, sure there are a number of cases where it doesn't work, or you can't boot off a partition at the end of the device. On the other-hand, having used various RAID devices >2T, some of which were transparent SATA devices (aka 2HD's striped, exported as a single SATA device) for years. I haven't had a major problem since the 2003/4 with them. Back then many of the linux filesystem (ext2/reiser/etc) had performance or data integrity issues with disks that large. Back then switching to XFS or similar was usually the solution. With windows, I can't remember having a problem in a LONG time.
Basically, if you don't plan to boot of the drive, its probably going to work just fine in any machine made in the last 5-7 years. Booting is another issue, but there are workarounds. Same as always, I remember having to have boot managers install in my boot sector to boot off a 512meg disk in the early '90s. Same game now, only there are a number of alternatives, including bootstrapping from USB flash.
LTO is more reliable for archive then a hard-drive.
And it is pretty hard to have an off site backup with a live RAID. Not impossible mind you but shipping them to Iron Mountain or taking them to your bank and putting them in a safety deposit box is pretty easy.
Also disaster recovery. What happens if your office burns down? Or if you have a massive power surge? Tornado? Hurricane, or a computer virus that destroys your data?
In a real IT setting you will have a RAID, onsite backup, and an offsite backup. And even with a RAID you may have your RAID array mirrored to another array and you will have several hot standby drives in your array just in case.
You could have a blizzard and have a drive in your array go down. A hot stand by means that you will not be running with out redundancy for any length of time.
Externals do have a place but not for in a serious datacenter. If your data is worth millions or millions of dollars then a few grand for a tape with library will be no problem.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Recorded media (both analog and digital forms of photographs, audio and video) are as much a part of our cultural heritage as paintings and sculptures from previous eras.
Losing the last copy of a TV show or movie is not much different from losing the last copy of a book. It isn't just the great works that deserve archival, since future generations can learn about the state of society from both low budget movies and merchant ledgers.
And to more directly answer the question in your first sentence, I think it's unfortunate that several of the early episodes of Doctor Who were lost for the purpose of saving warehouse space.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
> Yeah, but why? It sounds like you have hundreds of hours of video stored locally. Do you really watch that much tv?
If I "bought" stuff, then I want to "keep" it.
What's so hard to understand about that?
It either goes on a shelf in a spiffy case or it sits on a hard drive.
Oh, you thought I should throw money at Apple for months on end FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A few tearabytes of disk space and some DVD box sets are a quick and easy way to get carte blanche on the computing expenses.
Putting her favorite shows at her fingertips is the quickest path to the greatest WAF.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...again with the "Apple is catering to total n00bs" so they shouldn't bother with the finer details "rationale".
Plenty of people with the means and interest in demonstrating their
affluence by conspicously consuming Apple products simply don't
have to bother with WiFi.
WiFi is so ghetto.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Since start-to-finish projects only come in sub-terabyte levels, a single 1.6TB LTO4 tape holds that specific project nicely for around $120.
It's more of an archive, than a backup, as others have mentioned. I feel I can trust my Raid to hold recordings and masters for about a month, which is usually all it takes to finish it up.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Many of these are DOS/Windows specific, but some are BIOS or hardware limitations.
First, there was the 32MiB limitation. Actually, I think there was a 16MiB limit with FAT12, even though it theoretically supported 32 MiB
Next, they allowed up to 4 partitions, so it was 32MiB/volume, 128MiB per drive.
Next, the extended partition, allowing more than 4 volumes.
Next, up to 2GiB per volume, where we remained for a while.
Next, the CHS addressing system limited you to 8GiB, less on some systems
Next, FAT32 allowed up to 32GiB per volume, then 64GiB, then 2TiB.
Next, NTFS allowed up to 16EiB (theoretical), but NT4 wouldn't let you create a boot volume > 4GiB.
Next, the 128GiB/137GB 28-bit LBA limit.
Next, 48-bit LBA allows up to (theoretical) 128TiB (512 byte sectors), or 1PiB (4k sectors)
However, the BIOS and MBR limits you to 2TiB.
EFI has been available and shipping for at least 4 years, but most manufacturers have ignored it. Anyone having fun yet?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Depending on which company that sells RAID devices you work for (Qnap?), it's quite possible that the fault is with your devices and not the drives.
They are just hard drives like any other, after all. They work just fine for most people.
I think the idea is that RAID for your active online storage isn't a replacement for a backup. Now, a second RAID near-line is a perfectly good backup, but it needs to be powered up and tested periodically.
Does it work with Linux? I.e., the chip can't read 2TB, but it only has to read the boot block, and then Linux drivers take over the rest.
Or have /boot on a flash drive.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I've seen tape drives go bad such that they would destroy any tape you attempted to read in it. Drives DO just go bad. It's important to periodically spin them up and scan for errors. If any are found, replace the drive and rebuild the RAID. Same deal for tapes.
Agree, in my case I use unRAID which puts all parity on a single drive and uses standard FS for the rest. I get to use all but one drive for storage, can spin down drives not being accessed, and if I DO lose two drives I only lose the data on those two and not the entire array. I can use standard tools to try and recover those drives too. A double drive failure is very scary! I cannot back my stuff up with tape - too costly. But I can recreate most of my stuff and my music is backed up in multiple places. Hrm, need to do that again actually...
So far I've never lost more than one drive but I have lost 5-6 single drives over the years I've been using this software. I've got about 16TB spread over 2 servers mostly because I use one for testing\backups, and the other just for video and music storage. With these new drives I could put a single server up into the 40TB++ range. That's sick!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Do you ever turn your computer off?
I don't. And my drives seem to be (pretty much) fine for the last 6 years (1 year for WD green 1TB).
By the way, palimsest (branded as "Disk Utility" in Ubuntu) is an easy way to get SMART disk failure predictions. There's also GSmartControl, which is more advanced.
Click here to install in Debian/Ubuntu.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
>I'm not sure how non-techies manage it though.
They don't back up. And therefore (to a greater extent) their drives don't fail.
The act of constantly churning through a drive to back it up or rsync it actually causes it to fail.
This is a controversial hypotheses for which I'd love to be able to get/create some scientific data.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Suuure they are - Supermicro makes a very nice 5n3 device that allows you to cram 5 drives where 3 would normally go. Has it's own cooling fan and takes less than 5 power connections too. setup a RAID on that and you're good to go. I use unRAID for my video and backups, works well on standard hardware. Lots of other ways to do this too but with little trouble you too can be rocking 16TB or more - especially with new 3TB drives hitting the streets :-D
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Here's what did it for me. Picture a large rack of DVD in your living room. All nice and alphabetical and tidy - tidying this is a hassle BTW as new DVD are purchased. Now picture the following scenarios... Friend or family comes over and wants to borrow "some DVD" and begins pawing through them. They take a few... weeks go by and you finally get them back. That is mildly irritating but no biggie really unless they come back scratched or get "lost". Now imagine this - you are having some workers into your home to say clean carpets. They walk in the door and stop dead in their tracks looking at the rack "WOW man! That's ALOT of DVD!". Visions of having had your CD collection stolen from your car 3 times race through your head - to include finding some of them at the local used CD shop (where you bought most of them to begin with). This is not a fun feeling and the investment is FAR higher.
Hrm says you - perhaps having all of this media put away in a box somewhere and only having a very friendly user interface like XBMC and a server sitting in the corner streaming them would be smarter.....
I now have a few TVs in my home and each of them have a small ION powered box next to them running Linux with XBMC loaded. I can play any movie I store, any song I store, or stream many kinds of media from my central server without issue. Can display all of my pics this way too. No longer do I worry about someone walking in and spotting my media coming back later to make a quick buck. I do have to worry about them stealing the damned TV - maybe one day I'll have a home that's suited for a projector :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
A little commercial snipping and H.264 compression will help solve that. Even if you knock the resolution down it will look better than SD and take up much less space. I've given up storing TV shows at full resolution - takes too much space! I don't mind the "SD" stuff that's been knocked down from HD captures though - it looks good to me. I compress BD too just because I cannot notice the difference and it can take down the file size by at least a third except in weird cases where it gets bigger (lol). DVD though - I don't compress those suckers at all, 4-9Gig is nothing to me :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
>Some schools buy networked content servers to save their Internet bandwidth (literally a 250Gb Linux cache with Apache so they access local Flash resources sucked from an online repository overnight),
You wouldn't happen to be referring to caching the Flash-based educational site starfall.com, would you? I had a devil of a time trying to cache that locally, how did you (if you did)?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Ubuntu does that too (only on certain boards, though). I've had trouble getting it to wake up on older mboards, leading to the REISUB sequence.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I don't think the WD green is designed to be near-online.
Besides, isn't the term "nearline" usually used to describe automatic file retrieval by a robot from tape?
That's a lot different from a hard drive which may be a few milliseconds off from the world's record Barracuda drive speed.
I use it as a main drive, and it's basically fine.
And if you almost never retrieve a file, and the hard drive rests as a consequence, will a few seconds really hurt you after retrieving a file after a few weeks?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?
Because all those pesky keyboards that we use have a "Delete" button...
AFAIK the purpose of the "Green" product line is not performance (aka RAID), but energy saving. Actually the slogan that the y use for the line is: "Cool, quiet, eco-friendly" High performance and RAID are not mentioned. So combining these drives with RAID systems is probably not what the product-line is intended for...
True, I was projecting a little based on what Netflix, Hulu, Voddler etc. offer today and in practice you'd have an Akamai-like system around the world. However, it's not like you have to push everything in real time. For TV and movie releases with a fixed release date you could download an encrypted version at night and at release time you get the decryption key. If you want something streaming live you might have to turn down the quality settings down to "normal" 1080p (~11 Mbit), 720p (~5 Mbit) or 480p (~2 Mbit). With use comes bandwidth, ISPs won't be able to hold back progress (except maybe in the US). Checking the bandwidth stats from Norway ~50% of all households can do DVD streaming and ~20% some form of HD today and that many people could get faster lines but don't see the point. If the content came, this revolution could happen quite quickly at least in some parts of the world.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is a big difference here: he probably uses hard raid. You use soft raid. Most raid controllers have a limit to the recovery time, in some cases this cannot be changed manually. MDADM doesn't have this check. The NON-Raid Edition green drives have an unlimited recovery time. If the controller recovery time is exceeded the controller will drop the disk.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
AFAIK the purpose of the "Green" product line is not performance (aka RAID), but energy saving.
The purpose of the "green" drives is marketing spin to make 1980s era spindle speeds sound like a good thing. "Slow" becomes "saving the planet" or "saving money on electricity" even though the actual power savings are minimal. Maybe a 2-3 watt savings compared to a 7200 rpm drive. I have enough offline 5400 rpm storage as it is. I don't want any more. I'll wait for the overpriced Caviar Black version. Or maybe Seagate will finally at least announce their own 7200 rpm 3TB drive.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Furthermore, there is absolutely 0 (legitimate) reason to be running XP on a machine which will recognize a 3TB drive at the hardware level. None. If you can come up with a reason, there's probably a better way to do it than your proposed approach, long term.
In what way is Windows Vista or Windows 7 better than XP? There is no reason to "upgrade". I guess if you are running Windows Vista/7 you probably need a 3TB drive just to contain your ever expanding WinSxS folder. Windows Vista and 7 are the most bloated operating systems the world has ever known. 40 to 60 GB for an operating system partition? Are you kidding me? Even Linux is getting bloated these days, but its not even in the same league as the newer Windows OSes. One particularly nice thing about Linux or OSX or Windows XP is that they will actually fit on an SSD. Good luck with your Windows 7 partition on a 60 gig SSD. I could easily fit 10 normal OSes on the same size disk. The insane bloat of post XP Windows is the main reason why I am planning to phase out my Windows use (except for games) and migrate to a combination of a small, streamlined, Linux distro and OSX (on a hackintosh partition) for apps like Adobe Premiere that don't have a Linux version. Really the only legitimate use for Windows 7 or Vista is for games and most of my favorite games won't even run on Vista or Win7. Eventually games won't be backward compatible with XP and I will have to dual boot Windows 8 and XP to support all of my games.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It is interesting that the seller is claiming a 7200 rpm spindle speed. If that's true then I don't understand why this would be a Caviar Green. The same seller is also selling an unannounced 3TB Seagate XT internal drive, although he may have just pulled a Goflex drive out of its enclosure for that one.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Unfortunately these are Western Digital "Green" drives...
I agree. I only buy 5-year warranty drives. Once they've outlived their usefulness to me, I can still re-sell them to someone else with the assurance that the drives have a couple of years left on the manufacturer's warranty.
In other words, once you go WD Black you don't go back.
\/\/\/
I want to know if they will be able to bypass the limitations of windowsxp, if you use it for external purposes only, ...just wondering...anyone?
as the usb plugged in, may not worry about 2 or 3 or 4 tb,
Well, the thing is, the digital packrat doesn't take up much space. Why not keep those old episodes around? It's not like you need to have a wall of VHS tapes to keep that stuff anymore.
Besides, sometimes it's not really worth going through all that stuff just to figure out what to delete or to keep. I can spend hours sorting through the files in those old directories, and maybe reclaim 20GB. Whoohoo, I just saved myself like $2 worth of drive space!
You never know. I had a 1.5TB in a AMD Socket A computer for a while - one of the first motherboards that came with SATA. The BIOS reported the drive as having a size of "M" (shouldn't that be MD?), but the OS saw everything properly.
I can only assume that you've not actually used Windows 7, or at least not for long enough to actually be in a position to form an informed opinion.
I have XP Pro on my PC at work, XP Home on my laptop and Windows 7 Home Premium on my desktop at home, and use a variety of flavours of Windows Server at work (and of course a variety of Linux distributions), and of the Windows versions I far prefer 7.
Where are you getting your "40 to 60GB" figure from? MS quote 20GB for 64bit Windows 7. In any case hard drive space is cheap as chips - I upgraded my home PC 2 years ago and spent around £60 on a 500GB drive. Even assuming 50GB is required, that cost me £6; I often spend more than that on lunch.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I remember firstly digitizing my whole collection, as 4gb dvds in digital format, then I heard about the avi format, and thought I will buy a dvd player that will play avi format and change my whole library to avi. ...i'll take this, and this one too, and oh yeah, this one would be nice.
That having been done, and many downloads later as some had not been able to convert easily (missing codec for sound etc...), I cleared up much space, but to my dismay, I also ended up downloading more content too....browsing the sites does that
Now at 4tb, plus 4tb backups of first 4tb. means I have 8tb.
Some are 1tb drives, others are 500gb....now if I can get my hands on one of these 3tb drives, my life will be less cramped, and unless I find someone to buy my older drives, then I will start finding more stuff to download....the irony of it all.