theraindog writes "PC storage has come a long way in the last few years. Perpendicular recording tech has fueled climbing capacities, 10k-RPM spindle speeds have migrated from SCSI to Serial ATA, Native Command Queuing has made mechanical drives smarter, and a burgeoning SSD market looks set to fundamentally change the industry. The Tech Report has taken a look back at the last four and a half years of PC storage solutions, probing the capacity and performance of a whopping 70 different notebook and desktop hard drives, SSDs, and exotic RAM disks. There's a lot of test data to digest, but the overall trends are easy to spot, potentially foretelling the future of PC storage."
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday July 11, @05:43PM (#28663915)
The current models don't spin very quickly, but in the future people will pay a premium for the increased throughput in 5000, 7500, and 10K RPM models.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday July 11, @06:24PM (#28664167)
The current models don't spin very quickly...
That's very observant of you to notice that SSDs don't spin very quickly. But I'm not sure I agree with your assessment that they'll spin faster in the future.
Why do you collect it? There is a near INFINTE supply on the web, easily found for free. If you are storing over 1.5 TB or pr0n for personal consumption....wow.
The Firefox Add-on AutoPager [mozilla.org] is your friend: automatically loads the next page inline as you scroll downwards. Turns multi-page sites into the single page they are supposed to be. Works great with many popular pages, including search results... and idiotic news sites.
I don't know, man. It's like finishing my plate of food-- mom always made me finish it before I could have dessert. The OCD in me must finish whatever page I'm on. Having the page infinitely expand is not conducive to productivity...
That's because Safari 'addons' are actually input manager hacks, which are theoretically designed to provide access for assistive devices on Mac OS X, but generally aren't. They work by dynamically injecting code into the executable. This means they can seriously break stuff if the application is updated, and can cause instability. I only use a single input manager hack for Safari, which is AdBlock. It's fairly simple, and hasn't broken anything yet.
I'm fairly fond of Link Widgets myself. It allows (ALT+ Page Up / Down) to cycle to the previous / next page. I mostly use it for sites where I appreciate the pagination (webcomics primarily.)
Sites with lots of superfluous pages like this one I just skim the first and last pages.
It's amazing what feats we have accomplished over the past five years. I really makes you wonder what storage technology we will have 50 years from now. I honestly can't wait to give my "in my day" speech to all the youngins when I'm 76.
"In my day, all our data was mostly stored on spinning magnetic disks... or platters as we used to call them..."
One thing I find impresive about the evolution of storage: 20TB was the total hard drive space manufactured in 1995, just 14 years ago. And today some sites are offering 1TB storage for free, and it isn't hard to imagine they have much more than 100.000 users.
Not only you get more and more gigabytes per hard drive every year, the whole world also gets a massive quantity of new storage space.
And yet, we keep on getting 'No space left on device' errors.
One thing I find impresive about the evolution of storage: 20TB was the total hard drive space manufactured in 1995, just 14 years ago.
I believe you meant 20 petabytes. You could already get gigabyte drives back then, and it's hard to imagine that fewer than 20,000 of them were manufactured during the course of the year.
3 benchmarks for the same thing? oh right this is techcrunch they need to fill every page with as many stupid ads as possible, and draw out their pointless review to the point you gag.
summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
Actually, I was surprised by the results for magnetic storage which showed a 2-3x performance gain over the older generations. Pretty amazing for a technology that was supposedly as "good as it's going to get". Seems perpendicular recording helped quite a bit allowing drives to get much bigger and increase in performance, mag drives may not be at the end of their rope yet.
This makes sense, of course. If disk rotation speeds stay fixed, and areal densities increase, then the number of bits per second passing under the head has to go up. As long as hard drive manufacturers can keep increasing storage capacity, they will get speed increases at the same time. (If you need to use longer error-correcting codes on the platter to achieve these densities, that can fight against these gains.)
summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
Hmm not the trends I've noticed. From what I've paid attention to: 1) Spinning platters hasn't changed that much, but they've gone down substantially in price. The sweet spot on capacity/cost including SATA connections and everything has gone up considerably and is now at 1.5TB/disk, which are only minimally more expensive than 1.0TB while the 2.0TB disks are top of the line and very expensive.
2) SSD prices were in freefall up until around march. Since then there's been 4 months of increased prices, very abnormal for computer equipment. Not sure if this means the prices will go much slower from here, if so that's bad because they're still at enthusiast pricing.
Basicly, it looks to me like we're header for SSDs as primary drives and 1.5TB+ disks for vast disk arrays that SSDs won't touch for a long while, they still have a 25:1 cost disadvantage compared to the cheapest bulk storage. Now I still got plenty old disks, but if I replaced all 12 in my Antec 1200 with the cheapest 1.5TB disk you can now deliver 18TB for less than 2000$ for the whole system, it'd be close to 100$/TB but slightly over. That's just freakishly huge compared to five years ago, so I still say things are moving along nicely.
Also I didn't get the Intel SSD, but I did get the 120GB Vertex and it flies. I can start a torrent doing 2MB/s random writes and I barely notice I'm doing it. The world is moving forward a lot, but honesly with faster Internet I don't feel quite the same need to store everything locally anyway. Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
nothing has really changed with platters though - space has been going up, speed hasn't really improved leaps and bounds and prices are always dropping. this has been consistent for the last 10 years.
and while SSD's have come down in price, cost per gig is still huge - it's a good few years before more then a handful of consumers are using them.
I have a 750gb that I filled with compressed video. My huge mp3 collection would be four times as large if I upgraded it to flac. A few terrabytes is not all that much and I could probably fill a 5TB array about as fast as 12mb/s would get me. With video now, especially HD video, drives are going to get filled up faster than ever. Also digital photography is pushing beyond film now with 50 megapixel sensors. They are quite expensive, but imagine what it will be like in another 5 years or so. Even my 10-meg camera stores 12 megabyte raws. Its not hard to fill up a 4gig card at around 300 images.
What can I say? Hoarding is also addicting. Who knows. Maybe one day society will collapse and these huge caches of media will be some of our only copies of our cultural history. I think it is important for music to be preserved, and with many things going out of print and obscure record companies dissolving, it is getting rather hard to find underground stuff from even the 90s.
And for performance we can forget about storage that uses legacy drive interfaces at all. The performance kings these days are PCIe attach SSDs and they make the fastest of these SSDs look like tape drives in comparison.
Modern tape drives actually have tremendous throughput, and the $/GB crown. Keep in mind that the rated speed/capacity is the raw data to tape AFTER inline hardware compression, meaning you're usually moving twice as much or more data between the host and drive. Now, looking at seek times, they're polar opposites of SSD, but that's not the universal definition of performance:)
Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
Something will come up to eat the space.
CD-ROM's could store more text than you could ever need. Then came multimedia content. CD's suddenly felt cramped.
Time was when computer music meant mod files. Who had the space to devote to encoding real live music? Now we have mp3 players in our pockets.
We'll come up with more and more stuff to eat up the space. Video is the biggest driver right now but even the most hardcore downloader will need some time to fill up a 1.5tb drive. Hardcore geeks who keep the last t
But we'll come up with something else. I don't do video editing but by all accounts you eat up hard drive space like candy.
I do have "the ultimate" in hard disk space eating, a HD video camera. But even that... there's limits to how many hours of boring home video anyone really wants to watch and there's not that many GB/hour of film. I'm sure that for Japanese photo freaks that seem far more busy photographing where they've been than being where they're at will have problems, but not me.
The next revolution we desperately need is reliable archival storage. Tapes tend to suck and backing up to a second external drive just makes me think of the RAID admonishment -- "RAID is not backup." (...) No, DVD's are worrisome when talking about really important data.
RAID is not backup because any error will immidiately propagate to all the disks. Multiple independent copies like say an external drive is ba
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday July 11, @07:00PM (#28664363)
Looks like slashdot is on its high horse, saying "of course SSDs are faster, duh, what a waste of time!".
And yet if somebody had written that in a blog, everybody would merrily trolling about how "anecdotal evidence is irrelevant, BTW my HDD is teh fastest". I don't understand it. Somebody goes to the trouble of comparing a shit-load of drives in a variety of tests, and apparently the results are boring/irrelevant.
Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit.
"Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit."
The truth is the way the article displays the information is shit, they could have done a lot better job on information presentation... and anandtech did a big write up on SSD's a while back that should tell anyone all they really need to know until SSD's come down to sane price levels and storage capacities. Everything published here isn't new, and has been known for a long time and has been written about better by anand.
I think you didn't notice that the reason Anand's writeup is so useful is that he exposed the major performance degradation present in every SSD as it gets filled with data and begins to need to overwrite old data that was marked as deleted. I may be misunderstanding you, though, since your writing is incoherent.
Also, I've read Anandtech since 1997, so I'm pretty sure you didn't, as you say (with incorrect spelling, which is surprising from a journalist such as yourself) write these reviews "FAR IN ADVANCE
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday July 11, @09:06PM (#28664881)
The format of those charts is retarded. They should have time on the x axis and whatever metric in log scale on the y axis. I couldn't care less which drive from 2005 is linked to a specific data point. I just want to see the trends as a function of time. In the later charts, with apparently fully exponential trends, you can't see whats going on at all.
Interesting that there appear to be no subjective or objective noise measurements (I did not read the entire article, as some moron has seen fit to split it across twelve pages). I remember when 7200 rpm drives first came out, they were aimed at the server market and a RAID array of them made the room sound like there was a generator running. The 7200 rpm drive in my recent iMac is whisper quiet by comparison.
I assume the newest 15,000 rpm drives are similarly noisy.
If you're doing it right, it shouldn't be a big deal if the disk dies. If you have an internet connection, it should be trivial to ensure that you have your data backed up in multiple places that are widely distributed geographically. I've had drives die, disasters take out all of my hardware. I've never lost data.
If you have an internet connection, it should be trivial to ensure that you have your data backed up in multiple places that are widely distributed geographically.
common problem with the world is that everybody assumes everybody else has the same needs as yourself. yes, internet backup might be trivial for your couple of dozen word files (although privacy is not included in the discussion here), but i have currently about 8TB of data spread over at least 15 drives here at my place.
please explain me again how it is trivial to have that backed up at multiple locations?
Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
Best of all, rsync.net will let you access your data through WebDAVs, so it's like you can take your data with you anywhere you like, as long as you can get online somehow.
Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
You must be joking! He has 8TB ! It would cost him $3840 PER MONTH to back up with rsync.net (yes, at the bulk discount rate). I'm sure you can fit a whole system with 8GB space in under $1000 if you go for the cheapest $/GB drives (probably 1.5 TB). Also you would fit most likely 4x2TB drives (only the drives) in $1000. With these numbers is very hard to see how you can do it yourself and NOT have huge savings compared to $3840 per month. Let's say each month you give one system (which is up-to-date) to a
I know I'm probably rare, but I have yet to have one die that I actually purchased, I have thrown out 2 that likely would have, but not because they were failing, simply because by 2002 I had no use for a 600MB and 1GB drive, I've got a 1.6GB Western Digital from 1996, that still runs fine, although I only use it rarely as a sort of exaggerated floppy between PC's with no NIC. One 60GB (Maxtor, 2001), and two 80 GB's (Maxtor, 2002) still running fine in their respective boxes (an HP, and a Compaq), and two
You are pretty lucky. I've had quite a few drives fail over time, some containing very irreplaceable data, but such is life. I just recently lost the logic board an an 80gig drive. It contained 6 months worth of work on it that I was meaning to back up again, but never got around to. I think I can fix it, but maybe I can't, so it may just come as a lesson learned. Anymore if a drive lasts beyond a few months it might be ok for some time, but you should probably worry about it after a year or so. However, yo
That's weird, the only two drives I've ever had die on me were a Seagate (which is actually quite useful as a paperweight) and a Maxtor. Guess i got the duds that were meant for you...
Now Western Digital and Samsung on the other hand... the 80 gigger WDs I bought some time around 2002 (or was it 2003?) have been abused so badly (swapped in and out of cheap external cases, thrown into checked airline baggage without so much as anti-static wrap, dropped by idiot friends...) are still going strong as 2nd-and-3
A similar history will play out for SSDs (Score:3, Funny)
The current models don't spin very quickly, but in the future people will pay a premium for the increased throughput in 5000, 7500, and 10K RPM models.
Re:A similar history will play out for SSDs (Score:5, Funny)
That's very observant of you to notice that SSDs don't spin very quickly. But I'm not sure I agree with your assessment that they'll spin faster in the future.
Parent
Re: (Score:1)
Actually, I think we also need a +1 whoosh mod, which that definitely deserved.
It is said... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is said that pr0n drives certain sectors of technology. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a single drive to store my whole collection... :-(
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Unfortunately, I have yet to find a single drive to store my whole collection... :-(
Sex drive should be enough of a drive to store all your collection, or at least to try to.
Re:It is said... (Score:5, Funny)
Are you implying that your disk isn't hard enough?
Parent
Re:It is said... (Score:5, Funny)
Well it used to be floppy so we're improving
Parent
Re:It is said... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Why do you collect it? There is a near INFINTE supply on the web, easily found for free. If you are storing over 1.5 TB or pr0n for personal consumption....wow.
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Or maybe he can't delete it because the bytes are all stuck together.
Overall Trends (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Overall Trends (Score:5, Informative)
on one page instead of 12
The Firefox Add-on AutoPager [mozilla.org] is your friend: automatically loads the next page inline as you scroll downwards. Turns multi-page sites into the single page they are supposed to be. Works great with many popular pages, including search results... and idiotic news sites.
Parent
Re:Overall Trends (Score:5, Insightful)
That, sir, if the Comment of the Week right there.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know, man. It's like finishing my plate of food-- mom always made me finish it before I could have dessert. The OCD in me must finish whatever page I'm on. Having the page infinitely expand is not conducive to productivity...
Re: (Score:1)
Where's the Safari version?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
I'm fairly fond of Link Widgets myself. It allows (ALT+ Page Up / Down) to cycle to the previous / next page. I mostly use it for sites where I appreciate the pagination (webcomics primarily.)
Sites with lots of superfluous pages like this one I just skim the first and last pages.
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
spread out over multiple pages.
sorry i got lazy.
12 pages? (Score:1, Insightful)
12 pages? Yeah, I want to read that. 12 pages of ads.
Re: (Score:2)
ads? what ads?
Re: (Score:1)
What is this..Ad-Vert of which you speak?
Technology moves so fast... (Score:1, Insightful)
"In my day, all our data was mostly stored on spinning magnetic disks... or platters as we used to call them..."
Re:Technology moves so fast... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only you get more and more gigabytes per hard drive every year, the whole world also gets a massive quantity of new storage space.
And yet, we keep on getting 'No space left on device' errors.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
One thing I find impresive about the evolution of storage: 20TB was the total hard drive space manufactured in 1995, just 14 years ago.
I believe you meant 20 petabytes. You could already get gigabyte drives back then, and it's hard to imagine that fewer than 20,000 of them were manufactured during the course of the year.
But, yes, exponential growth is impressive.
why so many pages? (Score:3, Informative)
summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
not much has changed with spinning platters.
Actually, I was surprised by the results for magnetic storage which showed a 2-3x performance gain over the older generations.
Pretty amazing for a technology that was supposedly as "good as it's going to get".
Seems perpendicular recording helped quite a bit allowing drives to get much bigger and increase in performance, mag drives may not be at the end of their rope yet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:why so many pages? (Score:5, Insightful)
summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
Hmm not the trends I've noticed. From what I've paid attention to:
1) Spinning platters hasn't changed that much, but they've gone down substantially in price. The sweet spot on capacity/cost including SATA connections and everything has gone up considerably and is now at 1.5TB/disk, which are only minimally more expensive than 1.0TB while the 2.0TB disks are top of the line and very expensive.
2) SSD prices were in freefall up until around march. Since then there's been 4 months of increased prices, very abnormal for computer equipment. Not sure if this means the prices will go much slower from here, if so that's bad because they're still at enthusiast pricing.
Basicly, it looks to me like we're header for SSDs as primary drives and 1.5TB+ disks for vast disk arrays that SSDs won't touch for a long while, they still have a 25:1 cost disadvantage compared to the cheapest bulk storage. Now I still got plenty old disks, but if I replaced all 12 in my Antec 1200 with the cheapest 1.5TB disk you can now deliver 18TB for less than 2000$ for the whole system, it'd be close to 100$/TB but slightly over. That's just freakishly huge compared to five years ago, so I still say things are moving along nicely.
Also I didn't get the Intel SSD, but I did get the 120GB Vertex and it flies. I can start a torrent doing 2MB/s random writes and I barely notice I'm doing it. The world is moving forward a lot, but honesly with faster Internet I don't feel quite the same need to store everything locally anyway. Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
and while SSD's have come down in price, cost per gig is still huge - it's a good few years before more then a handful of consumers are using them.
Re:why so many pages? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a 750gb that I filled with compressed video. My huge mp3 collection would be four times as large if I upgraded it to flac. A few terrabytes is not all that much and I could probably fill a 5TB array about as fast as 12mb/s would get me. With video now, especially HD video, drives are going to get filled up faster than ever. Also digital photography is pushing beyond film now with 50 megapixel sensors. They are quite expensive, but imagine what it will be like in another 5 years or so. Even my 10-meg camera stores 12 megabyte raws. Its not hard to fill up a 4gig card at around 300 images.
What can I say? Hoarding is also addicting. Who knows. Maybe one day society will collapse and these huge caches of media will be some of our only copies of our cultural history. I think it is important for music to be preserved, and with many things going out of print and obscure record companies dissolving, it is getting rather hard to find underground stuff from even the 90s.
Parent
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Modern tape drives actually have tremendous throughput, and the $/GB crown. Keep in mind that the rated speed/capacity is the raw data to tape AFTER inline hardware compression, meaning you're usually moving twice as much or more data between the host and drive. Now, looking at seek times, they're polar opposites of SSD, but that's not the universal definition of performance :)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
Something will come up to eat the space.
CD-ROM's could store more text than you could ever need. Then came multimedia content. CD's suddenly felt cramped.
Time was when computer music meant mod files. Who had the space to devote to encoding real live music? Now we have mp3 players in our pockets.
We'll come up with more and more stuff to eat up the space. Video is the biggest driver right now but even the most hardcore downloader will need some time to fill up a 1.5tb drive. Hardcore geeks who keep the last t
Re: (Score:2)
But we'll come up with something else. I don't do video editing but by all accounts you eat up hard drive space like candy.
I do have "the ultimate" in hard disk space eating, a HD video camera. But even that... there's limits to how many hours of boring home video anyone really wants to watch and there's not that many GB/hour of film. I'm sure that for Japanese photo freaks that seem far more busy photographing where they've been than being where they're at will have problems, but not me.
The next revolution we desperately need is reliable archival storage. Tapes tend to suck and backing up to a second external drive just makes me think of the RAID admonishment -- "RAID is not backup." (...) No, DVD's are worrisome when talking about really important data.
RAID is not backup because any error will immidiately propagate to all the disks. Multiple independent copies like say an external drive is ba
Thorough article backed up with a lot of data (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like slashdot is on its high horse, saying "of course SSDs are faster, duh, what a waste of time!".
And yet if somebody had written that in a blog, everybody would merrily trolling about how "anecdotal evidence is irrelevant, BTW my HDD is teh fastest".
I don't understand it. Somebody goes to the trouble of comparing a shit-load of drives in a variety of tests, and apparently the results are boring/irrelevant.
Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit.
Re:Thorough article backed up with a lot of data (Score:4, Informative)
"Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit."
The truth is the way the article displays the information is shit, they could have done a lot better job on information presentation... and anandtech did a big write up on SSD's a while back that should tell anyone all they really need to know until SSD's come down to sane price levels and storage capacities. Everything published here isn't new, and has been known for a long time and has been written about better by anand.
Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1 [anandtech.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think you didn't notice that the reason Anand's writeup is so useful is that he exposed the major performance degradation present in every SSD as it gets filled with data and begins to need to overwrite old data that was marked as deleted. I may be misunderstanding you, though, since your writing is incoherent.
Also, I've read Anandtech since 1997, so I'm pretty sure you didn't, as you say (with incorrect spelling, which is surprising from a journalist such as yourself) write these reviews "FAR IN ADVANCE
log scale (Score:3, Insightful)
The format of those charts is retarded. They should have time on the x axis and whatever metric in log scale on the y axis. I couldn't care less which drive from 2005 is linked to a specific data point. I just want to see the trends as a function of time. In the later charts, with apparently fully exponential trends, you can't see whats going on at all.
SAS, SATA, whatever (Score:1)
10k- and 15k-RPM spindle speeds have migrated from SCSI to Serial Attached SCSI and SATA, and ~5k- and 7k-RPM speeds have migrated from PATA to SATA
FTFY.
Noise (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting that there appear to be no subjective or objective noise measurements (I did not read the entire article, as some moron has seen fit to split it across twelve pages). I remember when 7200 rpm drives first came out, they were aimed at the server market and a RAID array of them made the room sound like there was a generator running. The 7200 rpm drive in my recent iMac is whisper quiet by comparison.
I assume the newest 15,000 rpm drives are similarly noisy.
Re: (Score:2)
If you're doing it right, it shouldn't be a big deal if the disk dies. If you have an internet connection, it should be trivial to ensure that you have your data backed up in multiple places that are widely distributed geographically. I've had drives die, disasters take out all of my hardware. I've never lost data.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have an internet connection, it should be trivial to ensure that you have your data backed up in multiple places that are widely distributed geographically.
common problem with the world is that everybody assumes everybody else has the same needs as yourself. yes, internet backup might be trivial for your couple of dozen word files (although privacy is not included in the discussion here), but i have currently about 8TB of data spread over at least 15 drives here at my place.
please explain me again how it is trivial to have that backed up at multiple locations?
Re:Great Technology? (Score:4, Informative)
1) Rar it up
2) rename it to "world's best porn collection"
3) Bittorrent
I suspect you may be able to skip step two
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
Best of all, rsync.net will let you access your data through WebDAVs, so it's like you can take your data with you anywhere you like, as long as you can get online somehow.
Re: (Score:2)
Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
You must be joking! He has 8TB ! It would cost him $3840 PER MONTH to back up with rsync.net (yes, at the bulk discount rate). I'm sure you can fit a whole system with 8GB space in under $1000 if you go for the cheapest $/GB drives (probably 1.5 TB). Also you would fit most likely 4x2TB drives (only the drives) in $1000. With these numbers is very hard to see how you can do it yourself and NOT have huge savings compared to $3840 per month. Let's say each month you give one system (which is up-to-date) to a
Re: (Score:2)
I know I'm probably rare, but I have yet to have one die that I actually purchased, I have thrown out 2 that likely would have, but not because they were failing, simply because by 2002 I had no use for a 600MB and 1GB drive, I've got a 1.6GB Western Digital from 1996, that still runs fine, although I only use it rarely as a sort of exaggerated floppy between PC's with no NIC. One 60GB (Maxtor, 2001), and two 80 GB's (Maxtor, 2002) still running fine in their respective boxes (an HP, and a Compaq), and two
Re: (Score:2)
You are pretty lucky. I've had quite a few drives fail over time, some containing very irreplaceable data, but such is life. I just recently lost the logic board an an 80gig drive. It contained 6 months worth of work on it that I was meaning to back up again, but never got around to. I think I can fix it, but maybe I can't, so it may just come as a lesson learned. Anymore if a drive lasts beyond a few months it might be ok for some time, but you should probably worry about it after a year or so. However, yo
Re: (Score:2)
re:
For many slashdotters, that is not off-site storage. ;)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's weird, the only two drives I've ever had die on me were a Seagate (which is actually quite useful as a paperweight) and a Maxtor. Guess i got the duds that were meant for you...
Now Western Digital and Samsung on the other hand... the 80 gigger WDs I bought some time around 2002 (or was it 2003?) have been abused so badly (swapped in and out of cheap external cases, thrown into checked airline baggage without so much as anti-static wrap, dropped by idiot friends...) are still going strong as 2nd-and-3