A Look at Excessive Portable Storage

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo's all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech's flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie's state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5" drives. LaCie's drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the $600 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

Flash Memory Software Requirements

[LowlyWorm]

I don't think software requirements are keeping up with the newer hardware. True, I am writing this from FireFox installed on my flash drive but there is often very little consideration by many software developers for the needs of the portable software market. So much of it expects data on c: or writes to the registry. Since flash memory quality benchmarks are based on number of read/writes before failure it will be interesting to see how the newer USB hardware will stand up particularly with applications such as browsers and email that do extensive read/write operations.

Re:Another way of doing it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us have relatives that live in the countryside (no starbucks wireless access points) and who have locked down wired internet connections (only their company PC can get access to the internet). :-(

Now that's excessive!

[dazedNconfuzed]

1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter.

A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes.
The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec.
Now THAT'S bandwidth!

Re:"Excessive" Storage?

[mdf356]

If the internets tell me right, uncompressed 1080p uses about 5GB/s of video, so 18TB per hour.

A 3 node Isilon IQ 36NL cluster would therefore have enough storage for 4.8 hours of such video at 80% usage. And that's the smallest cluster you could get; a 144 node cluster of those bad boys would store over 230 hours (at 80% usage). Admittedly, 230 hours probably isn't enough for someone.

(Yeah, I'm pimping my company's products; I just want to point out that there does exist something that can store hours of uncompressed 1080p video).

Though why you'd store it uncompressed, since usually bandwidth is much more limited than CPU time for uncompression...

What is the point of the LaCie drive?

[CopaceticOpus]

Who in the world is this LaCie external drive made for? It has 2 500GB drives included, which can be run as RAID 0 or RAID 1. For the $600 price tag, I could purchase 5-6 external 1TB drives.

These things are most likely being used to store music and videos. I almost feel bad for all the people who buy one of these, set it to RAID 0, and then cry in a year or two when one of the drives die and they lose their data. If they had used the money to purchase backup drives instead, they would be fine.

The only possible advantage is speed, but the speed just isn't needed except for special applications, in which case it would be better to simply build a computer.

Here's the craziest thing about the $600 price tag - I could build an entire new computer running Linux, with a software RAID setup and twice the storage, for less money.

Re:Now that's excessive!

[gregorio]

1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter. A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes. The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec. Now THAT'S bandwidth!

The bandwidth will never be larger than half the rated speed of a single drive * the number of drives being read in parallel. Why? Because you have to write TO the drives before departure and read FROM the drives after arrival.