A Terabyte In A Cigar Box

Anonymous Howard writes "LaCie has introduced a 1 Terabyte (capacity) disk for (get this) only $1,199.00!(USD) It is external and equipped with FireWire 800, FireWire 400, iLink/DV, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 to connect to both PC and Mac. Take a look here."

Not a 1TB *disk*

[djrogers]

It's a 1TB array in a box (just look at the dimensions and weight if ya doubt it)... Not that it really matters - heck it's way cool..

No, only 0.9094 TB

[sulli]

They bought into Apple's fake-TB/GB/MB system:

* 1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

In fact, 1 TB = 1024 bytes ^ 4 = 1099511627776 bytes. So you're being shortchanged by over 10%.

Re:Wet blanket...

[wlpretend]

Now is that a real terabyte or just 1 trillion bytes?

From the article: "* 1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Once formatted, the actual available storage capacity varies depending on operating environment."

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Missing bytes growing fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically:
1000000000000 Bytes are:
976562500 KiB
953674 MiB
931 GiB .909 TiB

Re:Missing bytes growing fast

[wwest4]

oh, you mean you want a 1 TiB [wikipedia.org] array.

Re:No, only 0.9094 TB

[Elwood P Dowd]

Apple? Apple invented this system?

Every HD manufacturer known to man has used this "fake" system.

Re:Slow interface = bottleneck

[tvh2k]

Ugh...correction. The drive's 1TB, not 1TiB. Thats like 90GB lost to marketing!

Re:No, only 0.9094 TB

[sciwhiz007]

I know, I know, I'm nitpicking.

1 TB (terabyte) = 10^12 bytes, NOT 2^40 bytes. 2^40 bytes is represented by a value known as a Tebibyte.

Don't believe me? Check out http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html or google's cache at http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:lbDn9HCN0SAJ:p hysics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html+gibibyte+sit e:gov&hl=en&start=1&ie=UTF-8

Re:Missing bytes growing fast

[Anonymous Coward]

From the product specs:

> 1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Once
> formatted, the actual available storage capacity
> varies depending on operating environment."

This is exactly correct!!! 1,099,511,627,776 == (2^10)^4 == 1 TEBIBYTE.

Refer to the NIST reference at http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html.

Re:No, only 0.9094 TB

[RevAaron]

Apple's? Pfft. Who doesn't do that? Every hard drive I've bought in the last 10 years has done that...

It's LaCie... Good luck getting it to work

[Silicon Knight]

I can't speak to the Mac compatability since I don't have any, but getting LaCie external drives to work on PCs is an exercise in frustration.

My shop picked up one of their external firewire tape drives for backing up a win2k server. Spent a couple days trying to get it to work with any of several backup software packages. Called them and was told that it's only supported with one backup program on Win2k.

Swapped it (they wouldn't refund our money) for an external firewire DVD burner. The DVD burner works most of the time but it's extremely slow and the system (we've tried it on several) occasionally decides it doesn't exist.

Re:No, only 0.9094 TB

[JoshWurzel]

Wait, why is this *Apple's* fake system? Doesn't everyone who makes OR sells hard drives do this?

What confuses me is that they define their sizes differently. Some will say
a) 1GB = 1000 MB
b) 1GB = 1000000 KB
c) 1GB = 1000000000 Bytes

Is choice (a) really equal to 1000*1024*1024? See where I'm getting with this?

Re:USB 1.1?

[cybermace5]

Well you see, it actually has USB 1.1. But for your convenience, to copy one of these over a Hayes 300 baud modem would take: 300 baud == 30 cps == 30 bytes per second into 1e12 == 33333333333 seconds == 555555555 minutes == 9259259 hours == 385802 days == 1057 years == 1.057 millenia.

Re:Unprecedented

[thebatlab]

I'm not sure what your definition of "unprecedented" is but....http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=un precedented&r=67 [reference.com]

It has nothing to do with whether it was predicted to happen :S

Available in what quantity?

[jcc]

We use LaCie external drives all the time to ship data (FedEX is faster that 100Mbs coast to coast).

I recently tried to buy a couple of the 500GB "big disks" but they were out of stock everywhere, so had to settle for the 320GB version (2 160GB drives in a box). They must be connected with striping, because the I/O is a lot faster that single disks.

4 drives may be even better, but don't count on them being available in quantity in February. That's when you can start to back order them.

Re:Sorry..

[xmedar]

More AD, as it's not Inexpensive, 4 x $169 (cheapest quote on pricewatch.com for 250GB drives) = $507 that leaves $692 for the interface electronics and profit, now if it had 5 drives arranged as a RAID 5 array that would be nearer the mark, right now you'd paying over the odds for this, even though it comes in a nice shiny box.

Re:Slow interface = bottleneck

[jpmkm]

Just because it hasn't been mentioned on slashdot doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You have to look [google.com] for them [addonics.com].

Re:Missing bytes growing fast

[Espectr0]

The international system concluded in 1998 that mega,giga,kilo,tera,etc are base 10, therefore people that think that 1kb is 1024 bytes are wrong.

So, there is no bytes lost to marketing. Learn to use MiB and other units properly

Re:Man...

[Tim McNerney]

> Interestingly, where normal humans had needs of 100 meg, 1 gig, 100 gig storage spaces, this represents the first leap beyond what the ordinary person could ever hope to use.
People always say this. I have around 100 movies on DVD. 100 X 4.7GB = .5 TB. Add music and presto. Once again the "will never needs" are wrong again.

Re:It's LaCie... Good luck getting it to work

[dead sun]

While I can't attest to their tape drives, my girlfriend got a LaCie external Firewire/USB2 drive for animation and design classes and there have been no problems with it on PCs. Heck, I even managed to mount the thing under linux reliably on my desktop. The device path isn't exactly what I'd want to try pronouncing, but it works without issue.

OS X is apparently picky about mounting it with the firewire connection at times, but it sounds like terrible misconfiguration on a particular lab of computers. I've only heard how it recognizes the disk but refuses to mount it in that lab though. However, there's never been an issue with it connected to any of the many PCs around the apartment.

They seem pretty slick to me, and I've not seen any problems out of them on hardware I maintain. Plus the drive my gf got self powers off of firewire, so no extra cables on systems with the proper ports. Woohoo.

Re:Slow interface = bottleneck

[C10H14N2]

...of course. That tape is ultimately cheaper is pretty obvious. Sure, once you've spent the $6,000 necessary for a tape system that handles >1TB per cartridge, tape is cheaper for scheduled backups. But, really, if you have such a subsystem in place, you're not going to use a primary storage medium with the same transfer rate. The point I was countering was that 55MB/s was problematic in terms of backup. Unless you're backing up to another RAID or JBOD, 55MB/s is hardly limiting.

For it's purpose and form-factor, it's still a nice desktop workstation device that could be backed-up to tape just as well as anthing else and certainly at a competetive price. Obviously, this is not going to make it into the server racks, but that's hardly where it is being marketed to.

Or, make one yourself.

[GoNINzo]

Enclosure [yahoo.com] ~= $150
250 GB drives (YMMV) [upgrade-solution.com] ~= 4x$170
==
$830

Have fun. No G4 requirement to use the 800 Firewire interface, which is the only available on this solution.

Re:So many ports!

[zachlipton]

While I'm sure you intended this as a joke, it actually does come with a screwdriver I believe, just not a Philips-head. LaCie drives ship with a torx-headed screwdriver to attach the stand to the bottom of the disk (it can be removed for stacking). I'm pretty sure this is true of the BigDisk line as well (though I only own one of the smaller disks from them).

Re:wow... - take a stats course

[wfeick]

Sorry, but that's not the way the statistics work. The probability of a failure on a single drive is a cumulative distribution function. The longer the drive has been running, the higher the probability of a failure. Also, it's not linear. There are usually a few failures early in life, then relatively few for a long period of time, and then a bunch of failures again clustered around some point in time. It's kind of like a poisson distribution, but with a long head instead of a long tail. When the manufacturer reports MTBF, I suspect they're talking about where the mean point is on this curve (i.e. at what point in time have 50% of the drives failed). I don't work in the storage industry, so this is just an educated guess. Someone will probably correct me on this. Now, if you want to figure out the cumulative distribution function for a bunch of disks, you can't simply divide the MTBF by the number of disks. Instead, the probability of at least one drive failure is calculated as one minus the probability that none of the drives have failed. So, if there's a 10% chance that a single drive fails within the first year, the probability of at least one failure in a 4 drive box within that same year is 1 - .9^4 = .6.

Linux support simply not stated?

[Supp0rtLinux]

"...truly plug and play, this device requires no driver or software installation for Windows XP and Mac OS X users." My guess is that is simply interacts with the appropriate firewire or usb bus and needs no drivers. Linux could handle that just fine. Too bad they don't say so... they might get some more sales. Odds are though that it works just fine under Linux, but they're support staff aren't training to handle people using Linux environments. Note the 19'' rack mount option listed on the page though. They're obviously thinking enterprise use.

Nice box

[majid]

I had the opportunity to see one at MacWorld. They are very hefty and made of ultra-heavy gauge aluminum (feels more solid than the G5 case). Also very heavy.

The aluminum case is not enough to dissipate the heat generated by the 4 drives, so they also have a fan, but it is a very quiet one (as much as one can jusdge such a thing in a trade show).

The case is also available in a 2 drive 1/2 terabyte version for around $600.

Re:Or, make one yourself.

[evilviper]

Enclosure ~= $150

That $150 enclosure supports ONLY 2 IDE drives, so you're going to need a more expensive enclosure to do the job.

250 GB drives (YMMV) ~= 4x$170

All well and good, but if you've got no case to put them in, no-dice.

lousy idea

[ajagci]

This has to be 3-4 drives in a box without replication or redundancy (since you can't swap anything). That means you just greatly increased your risk of losing a whole lot of data at once because if any one drive goes, all your data is gone.

Get a real RAID drive or separate disks and you'll have more safety and more flexibility.