A Terabyte In A Cigar Box 691
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."
Slow interface = bottleneck (Score:5, Interesting)
Max sustained transfer rate :
FireWire 800: up to 55MB/s
FireWire 400: up to 35MB/s
USB 2.0: up to 34MB/s
OK, is backup/archive solution, but 5 to 8 hours to transfer all disk, how do you back this up? :-)
USB 1.1? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not a 1TB *disk* (Score:5, Interesting)
"All the space, and 1/4 the reliability!!!"
Re:Man... (Score:5, Interesting)
When you have to get a person to drive across town to move the hard drive from one place to another, having a few extra hard drives in that pelican case wasn't a biggie.
Re:Sorry.. (Score:5, Interesting)
They also mention hooking several of them together, that means if you hook even as many as 2 of them together, you are 8 times more likely to fail then a standard drive. I'm sure they are also using the cheapest drives and technology they can possible use to make a profit at that price.
Don't think this is the wave of the future.
No more ripping (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Man... (Score:5, Interesting)
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. It's got plenty applications, but not normal user applications.
Unless, of course, storage companies start getting smart and emphasizing fully redundant backups. Think about it. Wouldn't you pay an extra $400 to make sure your parents' data was backed up three separate places, virtually eliminating the chances they would lose it all.
Losing data is the primary reason people don't trust computers. Our terabyte overlords could make it that much more likely this won't happen.
Re:No, only 0.9094 TB (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Backups? (Score:2, Interesting)
Dictionary Attack in a box (Score:2, Interesting)
A terabyte is about 2**40 bytes. An MD5 hash is 16 or 2**4 bytes. Therefore this drive can store 2**36 MD5 hashes of (say) passwords. So you could launch a dictionary attack on a simple (non-salted) password very quickly and portably.
For systems with 6 char passwords mandated, even if you chose a truly random pswd value (e.g. about 2**6 or 64 choices per character), you can still cover the entire spectrum.
So, given a password hash like this, you could have everything precomputed ahead of time and potentially speed up your brute force attack significantly over one where hashes need to be computed on the fly.
Re:Slow interface = bottleneck (Score:5, Interesting)
Drive failure (Score:1, Interesting)
cheaper version (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, it's not exactly 1TB (2^40)...more like 1 trillion bytes (1.0x10^12). Replacing one of the drives with a 320GB, and voila! (the total cost will go up too but still less than a grand.)
Now take a few of these, and set up a RAID5 (can be done with linux or win2k/XP) and boom....reliable, high-capacity storage.
Cost per gig: $1.19 per Gig (Score:2, Interesting)
not the greatest i've seen
Re:Sorry.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Man... (Score:3, Interesting)
>1 gig, 100 gig storage spaces, this represents the first
>leap beyond what the ordinary person could ever hope to use.
Huh? I recently ripped my entire CD collection to my hard drives, and that coupled with a bit of video and the normal range of Windoze apps and entertainment software has consumed over 300 gigs. I'd love to have a terabyte right this minute, and I'm sure I'll need one within the next year or two.
Yes, and... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sorry.. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not really the smallest space. If you draw up an appropriately sized box on a bit of paper, you'll see there's really enough room to fit six 3.5" drives in the box (albeit tightly) in two stacks of three.
Ideally, they've got six 200Gb drives in a RAID5 (with a failure light somewhere). Probably, they've got four 250Gb drives in a JBOD. Possibly, it appears as four 250G drives. If they're really dumb, they've got four 250Gb drives in a RAID0 (the latter should make for some spectacular data loss stories though).
Thats Crap! why ? .. read on .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Article [findarticles.com] it was reckoned that this storage medium could have been manufactured for roughly 30quid (sterling).
Why havent we seen this technology yet ? well, its potentially a disruptive technology having this kind of storage available so cheaply to consumers would cause so many problems in the marketplace. It hasnt happened yet. Make no mistake, although this is a cool development. Just realise that there are things possible that cant be sold for reason of economy.
Re:Not sure.. (Score:2, Interesting)
RAMAC (Score:3, Interesting)
Twenty disk platters about a yard across, stacked up with LOTS of space between them. Hydraulic seek mechanism "several" seeks per second. (I hear it the fingers off more than one engineer when the interlock button was accidentally pushed.) Hub about a foot across with the motor built into it. (Extra windings, too, so you could repair the drive if one winding burned out.) Brown oxide glued onto the disks. If you need to change the disk assembly you need to take off the ceiling for another floor's worth of height and bring in a crane - which in some places was cheaper than shipping out the dead box and bringing in a replacement.
Don't recall the data density but it wasn't much. (The first model (305) had about 4.4 MB, or about 110 KB per surface, but the one I dealt with was a bit later vintage, attached to a 7094.)
Hear they had a head crash on one which filled the pretty plexiglass enclosure of the rotating mechanism with brown oxide ground off the disks. When they brought in the crane and removed the disks they discovered that the dust had been selectively attracted to the magnetic bit boundaries and had thus "developed" the disk (as was sometimes done deliberately with a solvent-based system applied to mag tape, to check head alignment and the like). You could read the data (naked-eye visible bits) on the tracks that hadn't been ground off.
Re:Man... (Score:3, Interesting)
Normal users don't record HDTV?
Normal users don't save dozens of DVDs?
Normal users don't record 250 hours of standard-resolution TV? (IIRC, Tivo is actually less-effecient than 4GB/hour, but we'll stick with that number)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Missing bytes growing fast (Score:1, Interesting)
Indeed, because kb means kilobit, and therefore is 1000 bits. KB means kilobyte, or 1000 bytes, and KiB means kibibyte, or 1024 bytes.
Which is the dumbest naming scheme ever invented. Imho computers internally use base 2 so KB (mentioned EVERYWHERE) should mean 1024 bytes, and KiB should mean 1000 bytes. This erroneous defining of KB and KiB is proof that standards bodies just end up in the pockets of large corporations.
Re:Missing bytes growing fast (Score:1, Interesting)
Oops (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
.9^4 = .6561
.9^4 = .3439
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