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

Posted by timothy on Wed Dec 01, 2004 09:50 AM
from the incrementalism dept.
Data Storage Hardware
zmcnulty writes "While not exactly a technological marvel in itself, IO Data Device's new 'HDZ-UE1.6TS' exemplifies the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities -- it's an external hard drive setup offering a total capacity of 1.6TB. Not much larger than four 3.5" hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space. Here's the Japanese press release." (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)
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  • Obligatory pr0n comment (Score:5, Funny)

    by syntap (242090) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:52AM (#10962892)
    But seriously... with this and an optical data line, running your own household Usenet server starts to become practical.

  • Creative paperweight... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:52AM (#10962894)
    Seems to me like this will be one of those pieces of equipment we will all "laugh at" next fall. I mean the size is good and all... but it is huge.

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

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

    • Re:Creative paperweight... (Score:5, Informative)

      by saintp (595331) <stpierre&nebrwesleyan,edu> on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:31AM (#10963254) Homepage
      Infact -- speaking of which -- with SATA getting bigger and bigger this thing is a "waste of money."
      Right on. This past weekend, I priced out a 2.5 Tb roll-your-own NAS box from Newegg for about $2500. Why would I spend $400 more for 900 Gb less?
      • Right on. This past weekend, I priced out a 2.5 Tb roll-your-own NAS box from Newegg for about $2500.

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

        I'm pretty darn happy with XServe RAID [apple.com] under linux but I'm always watching for the cheap alternative.
      • Because your NAS box does take way more space on your desk? Not that _I_ would even cosider buying this overpriced POS.

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

        I have the 2HD version and I couldn't be happier.
    • Exactly. I think I'll wait 2 years and buy a 1.6TB drive at BestBuy for $149.
        • But by then there will be a 500 TB drive on the horizion, so the question really is, when do you buy something like this, when is the best time to get the most bang for your buck?

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

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

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

  • Recent trend? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:53AM (#10962896)
    the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities

    This is a recent trend?

  • internets (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:53AM (#10962899)
    how many internets can this hold?
  • 6 250gb hd's a good controller for ~$1200? what is the point of this besides having another toy?

  • Hmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by pHatidic (163975) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:53AM (#10962903) Homepage
    But then where do I put my shoes?

  • $2900 = $1500 for prettiness? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stupidfoo (836212) <strictfoo-ignorant&yahoo,com> on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:54AM (#10962907) Homepage
    Hmm... $2900 for 1.6TB of storage? And no ethernet? Why not just build your own NAS unit that has the same amount of storage, includes ethernet, and would cost you about $1200-$1400? You could even put it in a fancy case for that price.

  • Sheesh.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by MHleads (751029) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:55AM (#10962915)
    Supported operating systems are Windows Me, 2000 and XP.

    It doesn't support any of unices.
    • Is it just me, or is there a tendency to say that hardware supports Windows, but is supported by Linux/Unix? As if the only thing that keeps Windows stumbling onwards is a big pile of hard drives and sound cards propping up its carcass...

    • Re:Sheesh.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:33AM (#10963272)
      Who would have a use for this type of storage, yet would at the same time run Windows Me?

  • LaCie has 1.6TB external as well (Score:5, Informative)

    by Schweg (730121) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:55AM (#10962923)
    LaCie has an external FireWire800/USB2 external drive available for about $1000, see here [lacie.com].

  • So? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by digitalamish (449285) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:55AM (#10962926)
    With the cost of IDE hard drives dropping, you could get 4 300 Gig IDE (or SATA) hard drives, and put them in an external case. I think you could shave a $1000 off that price. Even better would be if it was a network storage device.
          • Ok I am wrong sorry. Just Mod my origional message down I haven't used Windows 2000/XP enough to really check those features I was basing it on my NT knowlege.

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

  • If it's 1.6TB... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Slayback (12197) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:55AM (#10962927)
    Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?

  • LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme (Score:5, Informative)

    by luiss (217284) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:56AM (#10962929)
    Only $2199. Been available for a while now, there's probably a Slashdot story about it too.
    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1 [lacie.com]

    • Re:LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DLG (14172) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:08AM (#10963062)
      We are using the 1TB variety as an experiment in harddrive back ups. We ship the drives offsite. The cost is not that much larger than our tape budget and we are able to back and restore more quickly.

      They are firewire 800 so they go pretty fast.

  • 4 drives? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Woogiemonger (628172) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:56AM (#10962932)
    The device is basically an external hardware RAID implementation. I'm just wondering what they do to help the reliability of the data. I also wonder if you can choose to change the RAID configuration of the device. For people that don't care too much about the preservation of data, 4 drives running in parallel, at 4 times the speed would be kinda neat :)

  • Boatload? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:57AM (#10962938)
    Not much larger than four 3.5" hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space.

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

  • 1.6TB In a Shoebox, If You've Got the Money (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jumbo Jimbo (828571) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @09:58AM (#10962952)
    I'd rather have the $2,900 in a shoebox, thanks

  • You young wimpy whippersnappers! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:00AM (#10962973)
    $2900 for 1.6 TB!?! And you're complaining!?! Bah!

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

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

  • Who needs it? I'll get one from China (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:01AM (#10962984)
    Here's the Japanese press release." (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)

    Hahah who needs a hard drive? I don't have hard drives. i just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers. It's a lot cheaper.
  • My dad (Comp Tech for the USPS) talks about storage at his old college - they were one of the best systems in the state at the time, with a whopping 1.5 MEGABYTE storage. Give it a year or two - first comes the commercial application, then the compu-phile edition, then every Gateway and Dell is shipping with a TB Drive standard.

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

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

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

    * They blew through $80 million in VC money in under 3 years. About 10% of that went to EMC for gear that never saw a bit of data stored on it or routed through it. I'll never work for another startup again...
    • Funny worked at a startup 4 years ago and EMC tried to get my fired for not buying there 3.6 Mill 1.5 TB POS. Then the sales guy went to the I'm going to loose my job if you dont buy it. They also took the your just not testing it correctly stance (was testing through through a server to a load farm with copies of real world work)

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

  • At last some competition... (Score:4, Funny)

    by CPM User (582899) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:16AM (#10963130)
    for /dev/null ...

  • cheap stuff (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sai Babu (827212) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:25AM (#10963205) Homepage
    160gig maxtor have been as low as $30/each (closer to $37 incl tax) after rebate. For about $1500-$1600 total you can put 20 of them together in 3 sets of 5 plus 5 spares and have 1.9TB of RAID. Yes, it costs more for power. About the same as my 5 x 9gig 5.25" 70GB FDDI attached array run by a SPARC20 that cost almost $25k back in the day...

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

  • Those Crazy fortunes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Matey-O (518004) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:27AM (#10963223) Homepage Journal
    How appropriate that the quote at the bottom of the page for this article is:
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS

  • RAID 0 = your data is vulnerable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by haggar (72771) on Wednesday December 01 2004, @12:55PM (#10964702) Homepage Journal
    These 4 disks are striped (RAID 0), which is great for performance, but if any of the drives fails, you lost all the 1.6 TB of data. Given that there are 4 drives in the enclosure, your chances of a disk failure are about 4 times higher than that of a single drive.

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

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

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

    • Re:How Much is Enough? (Score:5, Informative)

      by vidarh (309115) <vidar@hokstad.com> on Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:08AM (#10963065) Homepage Journal
      I've got about 300 DVD's, and I want them available on demand and there's no way I'm going to reencode anything in MPEG4. Filling 1.6TB is easy :) Add my almost-there MythTV setup and storage needs rapidly increase.

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

      • Just a quick question:

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

        That is, if I took all of my DVDs and encoded them (DivX, or whatever...), could I basically set up a box to keep a stream playing all the time, randomly jumping around the entire library?
      • I wanted that too. Instead I have a pair of Sony DVP-CX777ES 400 disc DVD changers hooked up to an Escient DVDM-100 media manager. I just pick the DVD I want and it does the rest (even downloads cover art and movie info from Escient). $1700 for the manager, $500 for each changer (up to 3). You can have 1200 DVDs on demand for $3200. Probably the second best purchase I've made for my theater, next to my projector/screen.

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

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

          Secondly, I hate media. That is, little plastic and metal things I have to move around. (Furethermore: I could care less about CD liner no

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