Disk capacities to hit 500GB

[ToonGal]

Thought this was interesting. I'm holding off disk space expansion until these drive other prices down.

Disk capacities to hit 500GB
story at Forbes.com:
http://www.forbes.com/technology/fee...ahoo&referrer=

[Cayars]

I'm not sure how much you're going to see current drives drop if at all. When the new 400GB drives hit the market non of the lower capacity drives budged price wise.

I think that current drives are sold x% over cost and that is that.

All in all if you need 200GB or 400GB now, I'd suggest purchasing it now. Even if there is a difference down the road it won't be much. I'd rather have the use of the space now then try and save $10/$20 bucks a year from now.

[stanger89]

Yeah, seems like $.50/GB is about as low as prices ever get, it's just a matter of how much gets crammed into a single drive.

[Outvit]

Yep. They are probably going to rise around 100gigs a year at this point as they are able to fit more on each platter.

[Seek2034]

Staples currently (through the week) has 160GB maxtors for $70 out the door and most people are able to get office depot to pricematch, who then have an additional $30 mail in rebate. $0.25/GB can't be beat

[Outvit]

Originally Posted by Seek2034

Staples currently (through the week) has 160GB maxtors for $70 out the door and most people are able to get office depot to pricematch, who then have an additional $30 mail in rebate. $0.25/GB can't be beat

Eh, but it is not SATA. Only ATA 100/133 most likely.

[Seek2034]

so?

[Outvit]

Originally Posted by Seek2034

so?

It would cost $30 per hard drive to get a converter from SATA to EIDE.

[heffe2001]

There are SOME people who still us EIDE, so the 30/drive doesn't count or them.

[Seek2034]

like me

I'm trying to resist since I don't NEED it, I only bought my capture card for transfering old vhs, displaying tv/dvd fullscreen(native res) on my projector, and for recording the 2 shows I ever watch in case I ever miss one. Current 200GB is overkill for that *shrugs*

[heffe2001]

If it were a 200+ drive, I'd most likely pick up a couple .

I still use EIDE for the most part, so it'd be perfect...

[edswalton]

I am much less interested now in big disks than I was (I aim to pay $0.50 or less per Gig, but I don't want drives smaller than 200GBytes). I'm more interested in not losing data.

As the disks get bigger and bigger the loss of a drive is going to get more and more painful. My library has ~16 GBytes of digital photos (including priceless kids being born & growing up), ~500 CDs painfully ripped and recently (and far less importantly, but don't tell my kids), 30 episodes of Buzz Lightyear, 20+ episodes of Teen Titans, numerous Kim Possibles. etc. etc. Try explaining to them that one of Daddy's big drives failed....

I think the next 'interesting' thing is stuff like RAID in a box for home. At CES Buffalotechnologies just announced a 1Terrabyte home RAID box ($1000). It can even handle RAID5 (@750 GByte). It is 4 x 250GByte drives in a box with a controller. Assuming they have robust recovery tools for failures & rebuilding the raid, also I hope they don't do some chucklehead thing... this should be essential for the high end PVR...

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/...&categoryid=19

Since the cost is domintated by the drives, I would like to think that Maxtor etc will come along and offer a similar product for less (appologies to Buffalo). I would gladly pay $0.75/gig for a 1TByte array..

Daniel

[m1abrams]

RAID is no substitute for backups, do not let anyone tell you differently.

If you truly care about data loss, the only prevention is proper backups.

However if you only care is if a single drive fails will you be ok until you can replace it quickly then RAID 5 will help.

But their is so many other ways you can lose your data, and with RAID5 or others having the RAID controller card go south can also cause you data to go bye bye, malicous code (virus), human stupidity (oops I just rm -rf /*), multiple drive failure (happens more often than you would think), fire or other natural disaster. RAID is the extra protection needed in helping people getting more performance and more fault tolerance and giving the better uptime when the disk fails, but is by no means used as a backup measure.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by edswalton

As the disks get bigger and bigger the loss of a drive is going to get more and more painful. My library has ~16 GBytes of digital photos (including priceless kids being born & growing up),

That's what DVDs are for. Stuff like this really needs a true backup.

~500 CDs painfully ripped and recently (and far less importantly, but don't tell my kids), 30 episodes of Buzz Lightyear, 20+ episodes of Teen Titans, numerous Kim Possibles. etc. etc. Try explaining to them that one of Daddy's big drives failed....

This is the kind of stuff that a RAID-5 array is great for, it protects your investment in time (ripping, collecting), but stops short of trying to back that much stuff up. That type of stuff is replaceable (your CDs are the backup, or those TV shows will be re-broadcast) so a real backup would be impractical.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by edswalton

I think the next 'interesting' thing is stuff like RAID in a box for home. At CES Buffalotechnologies just announced a 1Terrabyte home RAID box ($1000). It can even handle RAID5 (@750 GByte). It is 4 x 250GByte drives in a box with a controller. Assuming they have robust recovery tools for failures & rebuilding the raid, also I hope they don't do some chucklehead thing... this should be essential for the high end PVR...

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/...&categoryid=19

Since the cost is domintated by the drives, I would like to think that Maxtor etc will come along and offer a similar product for less (appologies to Buffalo). I would gladly pay $0.75/gig for a 1TByte array..

Daniel

Would you really pay $750 for that type array? Then do it! 4xHitachi 250GB SATA @ $124=$496. Promise FastTrak S150SX4-M 64MB ECC cache RAID controller (0,1,5,10, JBOD & supports OCE) $209. Total $705.00 as of right now. (Pricewatch)

[stanger89]

I figure my array (1.75TB) cost me $.80/GB, that includes the controller and drive cages.

[edswalton]

I realise raid!=backup. My work & nightly backups are all on SCSI tape (DDS4) on my Linux box. Photos etc are all on 2 PCs & DVD or CD or tape. I hope the archival life of DVD is good...

I want convenience. I don't want to add more drives to one of my numerous Windows or Linux machines. I just want a lump of reliable storage on my network, I don't want to think about it. It would be really good if it supports hot(-ish) pluggable drives & recovery.

As an appliance there is less liklihood that pilot error will stop the OS booting etc. Clearly the su - ; rm -rf / scenario exists I can restore that. Extra kudos if the filesystem can be locked to prevent file deletes in certain directories... Perhaps some of these boxes are Linux inside and running ext3 or some other journaling filesystem. It would be good if it supports a decent set of file owner permissions etc.

Who here would buy a RAID box? Do you think there is a general market for this? Would you rather save 30% (or more?) and go home brew or buy a box?

Daniel

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by edswalton

Who here would buy a RAID box?

I might, in fact when I saw the first info on the Terastation I was interested. I figured if they came out for about $750 street, I'd get one or two.

Do you think there is a general market for this?

There's probably a market, 750GB of RAID-5 storage is plenty for most people, and at that size/pricerange it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to build a server.

Would you rather save 30% (or more?) and go home brew or buy a box?

Actually I'd probably rather have the 20-30% more storage that savings would buy me