LaCie Releases 500GB Add On Drives

Glewtion writes "LaCie has release their "Big Disk" - a large capacity FireWire case (400 / 500GB) with decent specs. The only thing they're not clear on is the fact that there are two drives in the case...but that only seems logical. Looks like it's only available in Europe though, so here's a link to a French Hardware site's description of it (translation courtesy of Google). Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection. Here's the LaCie page." What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly. Very Slick.

500 GB...

[urbazewski]

great --- I'll never have to delete another email.

annmariabell.com [annmariabell.com]

Portable mp3's?

[neksys]

Christ... by my rough calculations, you could hold 8,000-10,000 full albums on that sucker, if we assume that you have about 14 tracks on an album, with each track being about 4 megs. That's an ungodly amount of music - sometimes these little "comments" people add to their stories just irritate me. They seem to exist solely for the wannabe geek factor... I can almost see the submitter thinking, "Hey, what additional comments can I add that will *impress* people? I'm a geek too, right?"

warranty?

[halo8]

The French Translation Page says it has a 2 year warranty.. yet the Company page says 1..

Odd...

Why not set up a RAID in a box?

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be slick if it could be configured as a RAID system. 250 MB in one box with its own backup.

If only my TiVo had Firewire....

[wowbagger]

If only the TiVo had a Firewire interface....

Imagine getting 2 of these drives - 1TB on your TiVo.

Of course, I'd want a faster processor, or parsing the "Now Showing" list would take forever!

When compressed via divix...

[rusty0101]

Most people don't have enough movies to fill two of these things. With a couple of these, a Dazzel Holywood DV converter, and a DVD burner, you could easily go into business converting Home videos to DVDs for people.

Whether you could make any money at it would depend upon what type of home videos they brought in, and what you got them to agree to let you do with the stuff...

-Rusty

Re:Portable mp3's?

[ottothecow]

why can I only get this as firewire? I WANT ONE IN MY CASE

my mp3 server would love 500gb in a 5.25 drivebay, and that is plenty fast for playing mp3s. And if you need it faster and faster just raid-0 it and go.

I have never really be a fan of the external drive (what good is a 48x burner on USB 1)as a nice ribbon cable has always been faster than whatever I can plug into the back of my case (external scsi exempt) but firewire and firewire 2 are looking good. Personally I prefer them to USB2.0 but I hope that the competition makes them a standard not an obscurity.

Re:Portable mp3's?

[stratjakt]

I'm pretty sure the target for these isn't billy hardcores mp3 collection, or filthy mcnasties porn jamboree.

MP3s are small potatoes. Even the most 'hardcore' I've seen have no more than a few dozen cd-rs full. It's hardly the killer app for big storage.

These would be good in settings where one would need to archive big amounts of data, and still retain access to it in the short term. Maybe raw video footage, maybe great big uncompressed image files - blueprints or the like. I could think offhand I could use one of these to store all the ghost images of all the different workstations I would need to rebuild, and be able to carry it around.

You know, big stuff.

I guess someone could get one just to 'brag' about it.

Either way, it's 2 200+ gig drives in a raid array. It's not like it couldn't already be done. You can already buy a little box to convert your IDE drive to an external firewire. So put the two together, you have this.

Re:Redundancy...

[fusiongyro]

Maybe it's not for Mp3s. I'm interested in converting my audio collection to FLAC [sourceforge.net] format so I don't have to tolerate loss of quality. If I do that, I computed that my puny 15 GB colletion would take up about 100 GB, maybe more. And so I have room to grow, I'd want to have more like 300 or 400 GB of free space to do this.

I've been planning on buying a RAID set up to accomplish this. RAID, as you all know, uses more than one disk. You all know, apparantly, that the R in RAID is for redundancy. I'm not being redundant, I hope. RAID would give me the room for this, as you all know, by using one disk.

Apparantly.

So like, I need a lot of space. And this looks cool (though it might not be obvious). :)

--
Daniel

naw, WAV baby

[mixmasta]

forget crappy mp3....

I think flac is cool but is too little, too late at this point. With 500 gig I don't need to compress at all, saving my time, and as my music collection grows it won't outstrip hard disk gains.

DVD iso's are a totally different story though :-P

Re:Help! I need context!

[io333]

Last I saw, the LOC was 13 TeraBYtes. You'd need 26 of these drives. Alternatively, Each drive holds ~4% of a LOC. Yes, I understand your question was kind of a joke, but I thought I'd do the math real quick just to consider the implications. I wonder if anyone has a good estimate of how long it will be until the typical consumer PC has sufficient storage space to hold the LOC?

Re:Help! I need context!

[ottffssent]

It's not "how long until the typical PC can store the LOC?", it's "how long ago's LOC can the typical PC store?"

How big was the LoC 5 years ago? Under a few hundred gig, I'll bet. Today's LoC is (or so I read on Slashdot so it must be true) about 13TB. So how long will it take for desktops to reath 13T? Well, at their current ~40%/yr increase, about 13-14 years. At which point the LoC will undoubtedly have swollen to about another 13-14 years worth of PC evolution. But I don't think *anyone* thinks hard drives will continue to scale for almost 15 years. The superparamagnetic effect has been looming for the past 5 years or so and lord knows how much money has managed to push it off a few more years, but we're rapidly approaching the point where the amount of energy difference between a N and a S magnetic domain is the same as the amount of thermal energy present - presto, a random collection of bits.

Maybe materials science will surprise us once again. The road started with MR (magnetoresistive), then GMR (giant magnetoresistive) and something else whose TLA I can't remember. Then Pixie Dust, and now Pixie Dust2 (5 layers rather than 3) pushing 80Gb/sq. in (if memory serves). A 3-platter design using 3.5" platters with a 1" hole for the servo could pack just over 500GB in. Now figure buying them for $200 - suddenly ripping your DVDs to disc doesn't seem quite so stupid. My mind rebels at the thought of 5T of RAID5 storage in a 3U rack, with 2 hot-spares. I also cringe at the thought of formatting that. Or fscking.