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Hardware

320GB Hard Drives announced 503

Posted by CmdrTaco from the are-we-there-yet-mommy dept.
SparkyTWP writes "Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn by announcing new IDE hard drives with capacities of up to 320GB. Prices will be between $300 and $400 and be commercially available by the end of the year."
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320GB Hard Drives announced More

320GB Hard Drives announced

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  • Geezzzz... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mr.nicholas ( 219881 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @08:14AM (#4227222)
    How many years ago did 1TB of personal, home-based storage seem impossible?

    Now the big question is: how do I back this up?

    • Re:Geezzzz... (Score:2, Funny)

      by p3d0 ( 42270 )
      Buy two.
      • and raid them

        • Re:Geezzzz... (Score:2, Informative)

          by p3d0 ( 42270 )
          No, that's RAED: Redundant Array of Expensive Disks.

          Anyway, RAID is not backup. If you have two of these monsters, you could put them in different machines in different rooms, or even at a different site, and that would protect against things like big rocks falling on your computer, where RAID wouldn't.

    • Now the big question is: how do I back this up?

      with DVD-TB mode which will be the 56th variant on the DVD format standard of course!

    • Excellent question. The answer to the backup problem is probably going to be (for those of us without an array of LTO drives) a USB 2.0 or Firewire enclosure around another 320MB drive!

      Another possible option might be a hot-swappable, removable IDE drive bay. 3ware, still alive and kicking, makes them and the controllers to go with. Maybe even serial ATA will be an option soon.

      Perhaps we'll see cheap hard drive carrying and storage cases catch on soon, or just differently specced drives specifically geared for archival purposes. Possibly they will have lower performance, but be more reliable and shock resistant?

      Just an idea to throw out there for the low-budget crowd who likes random-access devices.

    • Redundancy != Backup (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mangu ( 126918 )
      If you just want to be safe against hw failures, buy two and raid them. However, that's not backup. A true backup system means you copy all your data and store it safely offline. The big problem is that tape capacity seems to grow slower than disk capacity.


      I have the following conspiracy theory: manufacturers are afraid of releasing large capacity tapes at a low cost, because they would be ideal for pirating video. Why are DDS4 tape units so much more expensive than 8mm camcorders? Because one can store the content of four DVDs in a DDS4 tape? Hmmm...

      • What I usually do is have 2 hard drives, the large one as my working drive, and another as the backup drive. Every so often (right now, it's cron'd to weekly i think) it tosses all the stuff i need into a tarball, datestamps it, and throws it in a folder on tbe backup drive. It works for my data, and stuff like that. it definatly wouldn't work so well for my mp3s, but i figure that since i payed for roughly half of them, i can rerip them (and into ogg, no less!), the others wern't mine anyway...easy come, easy go....
    • Ehh. I just use 160MB of it, and copy the rest to the other half. Doot-duh-doo...

    • Re:Geezzzz... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RobertNotBob ( 597987 )
      Years ago my group of friends set two goals to reach. A race of sorts. The first one with 1GB of RAM would win phase one, ( I was the winner on that one) and phase two was to get to 1TB of drive space. Looks like a friend named Paul will get to that one first, but a few others are not far behind.

      Pretty soon we will have to set new goals. I guess 1TB RAM and 1EB (Exabyte is next isn't it?) of Drive space.

      What do you think; maybe 5 to 6 years untill then?

  • Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MadKeithV ( 102058 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @08:17AM (#4227248)
    Now I'll have 20k of useful e-mails, but a trash folder with 319Gb of spam.

  • Reminds me of Oz (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kvn299 ( 472563 )
    Lots of flash and "Ignore the warranty behind the curtain..."
    • If you actually read the press release you'll see that the warranty on the 5400 rpm 320 and the 7200 rpm 250 are going to be three years, not the one that was previously announced. Quote: "These drives will also carry a three-year warranty."

  • Isn't that backwards? (Score:4, Funny)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @08:23AM (#4227299) Homepage
    Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn

    Shouldn't that be "Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more porn in order to fill the available space"?

  • $1 / GB (Score:3, Informative)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @08:25AM (#4227324)
    This increment will help go below $1 per gigabyte, retail. The 120 GB disks have been hovering at $150-$200 in my area, not quite breaking it.
    • Circuit City had a drive 2 weeks ago that broke the $1/gig barrier. It was a 7200 RPM WD 120 GB drive, $129 + tax and there was a $30 rebate. They were labeled as 5400 but they contain a 7200 RPM drive. The same drive packaged as a 7200 RPM drive was like $250. I remember the first harddrive I bought new...a Seagate 330 meg drive for 365. Oh the momories...
  • I keep reading all these announcements, and I know that I should upgrade.

    In the meantime, I have a 10GB. I remember when I got it, it was huge. I'm talking, can't fill this up huge. I still don't have it even close to full. Why? I have a 6GB archos player for my mp3s and source code doesn't take up that much space.

    What do people actually put on 320GB hard drives? I just can't fathom that much data. 6GB of mp3s was insane for me. One of my friends had 30GB of porn, but those were mostly divx rips. I find it hard to believe that the majority of people use this much, but they must or it wouldn't be commodity hardware. *sigh*

    • Re:This gets depressing... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @08:36AM (#4227405) Homepage
      Video editing would chew up 320 GB pretty fast... and that's not even HD.

      Being able to store CD's in a lossless electronic format (like FLAC) would also chew up space moderately fast, although you could fit one hell of a storage library on that.

      For business use more space is always good. Databases chew up space like nothing else, particularly when you're talking about data warehouses.

    • What do people actually put on 320GB hard drives?

      Four letters:

      T

      I

      V

      O

      Bigger drives mean bigger video libraries on PVRs, more home movies, etc.

      • Personally, I think TiVo may not go the direction of the huge hard drive for recorded program storage.

        With the pace of rapid advancements in re-writeable optical storage in the last four years, it'll be far more likely that by 2010 TiVo units will sport a 20 to 30 GB hard drive for the Linux-based OS, TiVo program code itself, and recorded program index pointers, then you'll see a 400-800 GB removable optical drive for the actual recorded program storage connected using a faster version of the Serial ATA interface. Such a device will finally spell the end of VHS.

    • Yeah, I was actually quite content and never had any space problems on my home boxes using 9 and 18 GB drives. Then recently, I built a new machine, and just for the hell of it because they didn't cust much, I threw in for two 40G IDE drives for the new box - basically one for linux and one for windows.

      Since I knew it was far more than I need, I've made a conscious effort to be a litterbug just to see how much I can take up. I never delete anything, never uninstalled unused apps - I've run an object code cach (ccache) on the linux side of the box for months now with an unlimited cache (compiling gcc, glibc, mozilla, etc)... I've just been messy all over, and installed tons of software - several multi-CD games under windows for sure, and just about everything under the sun in linux.

      To date I haven't reached the halfway mark on either drive, months later. The linux one is at about 19G used, the windows one around 10.

    • *bing* (Score:2, Redundant)

      by Galvatron ( 115029 )
      but those were mostly divx rips.

      And there you have it. Movies take up space fast. My personal quest is to get all of Babylon 5 (never seen it before, so I'm hardly willing to pay $80 a season for these new DVDs just to see what all the fuss is about), but I'm sure everyone has their own little pet project, be it anime, action movies, whatever. Sure, I burn to CD on a fairly regular basis, but especially for a tv series, I want the cds to be sequential, so if there's a particular episode I'm having trouble downloading, I start building up a pretty big backlog.

    • I don't know but I see the tendency for things just to grow.

      When I installed Linux on my former schools' computers I was given an 1GB partition for the task (the other GB was for Windows). I thought "oh, well, you don't need that much space anyway" (before you ask: /home came via NFS anyway, but the network wasn't fit for more stuff like NFS /usr etc). And with KDE, network, Netscape, Staroffice and some utilities the disk was about 3/4 full.

      Now I see those machines upgraded to 20GB and still with the old 1GB Linux partition, and I try to dist-upgrade. Whoa... "You don't have enough space on /var to hold the downloaded packages." WTF? It wants to download close to 400MB of packages and needs about a GB more space! With the same applications!

      When I started getting interested in KDE I thought I had lots and lots of space, with my 10G partition, I could mirror the KDE source tree (which, in 1.x times, took about a hundred MB). Now the sources are close to half a GB, if you take them all. And if you compile, you need at least 5GB of space for temporary stuff and binaries.

      So, where did all this space go? Features, mostly (IMHO). Other people call it 'bloat' - features that aren't needed. :)

    • I have about 6-700 cdrs from bands that allow taping. Being able to store them on a HD not only gives me a backup, it would make it easier for me to make copies for people.
    • What do people actually put on 320GB hard drives? 1. pron 2. pron 3. mp3s 4. pron 5. more mp3s 6. pron 7. code 8. pron 9. pron 10. pics of my summer vacation to disney world. actually, i have a use for it...i have a multimedia server which streams music to my home theater system... it acts like a big jukebox for my collection of 400 CDs which i've ripped @ 256Kbps...at that quality, the size of the mp3 is much larger...so more space is always a good thing...not to mention, i buy a lot of CDs...so a 320 GB drive would be excellent for my stuff now...and for all the future rips... oh yeah, and i usually store movies, videos and pictures on this box... right now i'm using a combo of 100GB and 80GB drives to keep this stuff...a 320GB drive would replace all of them...
    • What do people actually put on 320GB hard drives?

      Footage from my digital video camera. As well as compressed, I like to store the uncompressed version so that I can re-edit at a later stage.

      It absolutely eats disk space.

      Cheers,
      Ian

  • This is getting ridiculous....

    How do you backup 320Gigs ??

    A cheap tape drive on Ebay use DDS-2 tapes; that's 4Gigs max. Am I supposed to purchase 100+ tapes if I want a full backup and 7 days of incrementals ?

    At $5 per tape, that's another $500+, plus the time it's gonna take to swap these puppies in the drive.

    "Just buy another drive and RAID them..." Yeah, right. I got a few RAID horror stories for ya. "Well, who cares, you aren't running productions-grade stuff at your house..." Well, 320 Gigs of data takes a *long* time to accumulate, even with rips and all. Losing that would take you a good amount of time and bandwidth to accumulate again.

    This is the case of one technology pushing itself out of usefullness.

    • Tapes are old, old, unreliable, shitty technology. Just buy two drives. Another hard drive is a faster, more reliable backup.
      You can still back up your critical stuff on CD's. I've never known anyone to have more than a full CD full of truly critical stuff (at home). Hell, soon with DVD's, that's what, 17 GB??
      • Another hard drive is a faster, more reliable backup.


        Yeah, right. And if you have a virus in your main disk you have it in the backup as well. Backup is always done on tape, and you save a tape from time to time, usually once a week or so. A production system requires from time to time that you recover old files at arbitrary dates, and you cannot do that with just one redundant disk.

      • 99.9% of medium and large companies use tapes to back up their data. There's just no other practical way.

        Frankly, hard disks are old, unreliable, shitty technology. They've been around for close to 40 years!

    • How do you backup 320Gigs ??

      Why would you need to? OS and applications are a few gigs at most, and MP3s you can just re-encode from the original CDs.

      The benefit of having massive storage is simply as a cache: it's more convenient to have your music in one place than having to manually change CDs. The only people who are going to be generating and using 320Gb of original data (large databases, video streams, etc) are going to be able to afford to back it up anyway, because they're professionals rather than home users.

      Well, 320 Gigs of data takes a *long* time to accumulate, even with rips and all. Losing that would take you a good amount of time and bandwidth to accumulate again.

      So get one of these in an external drive case, mirror onto it, then take it away and lock it in a vault. Cheap, easy and fast... just the way I like it.
      • I take offense at that assumption. I've been doing some video editing lately of some old projects I did, family videos, etc...

        Pulling the source material in from the miniDV takes up a LOT of disk space. I could easily fill up 320GB and can't afford to buy some huge system to back it up.

        I agree with what you said about I can always reaquire the data from the source, but it would be nice to be able to save the work in progress.

        However, in 15 years, I've only had one hard drive bite the dust on me.
      • Re-encoding all those mp3's would take a LOT of time. I lost my mp3 collection and had to re-encode. I'ts taking me weeks only 'cause I don't have a lot of time being at home.

        Easy way to backup, as you said, is to mirror. A cheap ide raid card and a second drive is a $400 solution. And if you wished to backup to a second source, buy a second drive, plop it in a backup computer to be a remote mirror.
    • Get a neighbour and allocate each other a quota on each other's boxes. Write a script to backup to a file. Encrypt them with gnupg. Transfer the files using any one of half a dozen protocols over the wireless LAN.
      • 320 GB.

        Wireless LAN.

        Did you really say that? Since you'll be going from house to house, let's say you're blessed and/or have an external antenna, and can get actual throughput of 8Mbit/sec.

        So... well... carry the one... I come up with 114 hours. Give or take. Assuming a miracle signal. And that you or your neighbor won't restart, disconnect the lan, or run around in lead signal-blocking pants for five consecutive days. ;p

        Yahoo.
    • If you can afford a 320GB drive, you can afford to buy a tape drive that supports more than 4Gigs. :-)

      RAID is not a backup solution, it's a redundancy solution. It's fine for restoring your system if a hard drive crashes, but if you accidently delete a file RAID doesn't help fix that.
    • Buy a removable hard disk bay - preferably an external FireWire bay. Buy an appropriately large second drive - if you have 100G of stuff buy a 160G drive.

      Place second drive in bay. Connect bay to computer. Start to copy data, using normal OS copy tools. Go to bed.

      In morning, remove bay from computer. Power down bay, remove drive. Put drive in static sheilding baggie that it came in.

      Drive to off-site storage (e.g. friend's house, bank, whatever.). Place drive there, still in baggie.

      Voila! You've just backed up your data. Assuming a firewire bay, card, and 360G drive at the listed prices, this costs about US$500.

      If your system at home (craters|gets r0073d|gets a virus) then you can clean your system and immediately use the backup drive, while copying the data back over.
    • if you insist on tapes, [alternate.nl] this baby stores
      100 GB uncompressed.(tape = 139 euro) ADR tapes 2 are less expensive at ~EURO 540 but only 30 GB uncompressed at 75 dollar per tape.

      They are targeting servers with this drives

      --640 Kb is enough for everyone.
  • that the 20GB hard drive I've been using to develop commercial 3D games for the last two years is less than half full.

  • Robert X. Cringely said it well (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hrieke ( 126185 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @08:44AM (#4227482) Homepage
    At the bottom of his August 29th [pbs.org] column, he talks about how much information is really his on the drive-
    "I have on my main system every word I have written since 1992, which is around three million words. I also have every e-mail worth keeping, a couple databases, and many spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations. Uncompressed, it adds up to less than 200 megabytes. Heck, that is small enough to fit on one of those USB flash drives that attaches to your key ring!"
    Really, how much of that data is worth saving? How much of that data can't be re-created? If a fire broke out, what would you try to save? Me, outside of my photos (which the neg. are in a bank value) and camera(s), everything else I can re-create, and that which I can't, I have a USB flash drive.
    • Robert X Cringely may well be able to get all of his media under 200 Mb. He clearly doesn't have a digital video camera, which would hit that limit in around 3 minutes.

      Sure, you can archive it off to DV tape, but that's slow to access, and inconvenient for editing. 320 Gb will get you around 25 hours of DV footage, which for a home video enthusiast isn't really that much... there are plenty of "legit" uses for this sort of data capacity.

      Alternatiively, how about music? (Writing music, not mp3s.) It's common to run 32 channels, each at 24 bit / 96 KHz. That comes up to about 9 Mb per second - or about 33 Gb for 60 minutes of material. By the time you throw in multiple takes, storage requirements can get pretty hefty.

  • Legit Uses... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by purduephotog ( 218304 ) <hirsch AT inorbit DOT com> on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @08:47AM (#4227502) Homepage Journal
    So submitting a story joking about porn will get you on the front page of Slashdot. Interesting.

    I'm a photograper. At any given point there are usually 30 gigs of uncompressed TIFF files and 60 to 90 gigs of 12 bit RAW data floating around my room. Most, obviously, are kept on CDs... most computers cant simply comprehend the amount of space required for high quality imaging.

    If they SERIOUSLY sell the 320 gig for 300$, it will be my newest HD. At less than a dollar a gig, its better than the staples deals with the 80 gig ATA133 maxtors...

    Yes, you can need disk space for something other than MP3, DivX, and Porn.
    • Well okay, but not all of us are photographers. We just wanna grow our porn collection.
    • Which cameras do you have that you'd use TIFF mode and RAW mode? A Canon and something else I'd assume, or are the TIFFs just converted RAWs you haven't done anything with? And something recent (high res) to explain the 60-90GB part...

      I've got a G2 and I've taken 7500 pictures with it in the three months I've had it. I usually shoot in JPG though when it's "just friends" and save RAW for important stuff. The speed, or lack, of converting RAWs slows things down a bit.

      I'd like to pick up a D60 someday (well, I wouldn't turn down a 1D, but they're just kinda pricey). As good as the G2 is, the lack of lenses and the slow autofocus of consumer-level cameras is an issue.

      • Re:Legit Uses... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by purduephotog ( 218304 )
        Oh, you can also scan film at extended bit depth (not '16 bit colour' but '16 bit density' - they arent the same thing)... which generates huge files (compress nicely, tho.... but still).

        Or you can drumscan chromes to get images that are around 120 meg to 250 megs.... and if you are particularily anal (no pun intended) you can scan up to 8000 lpi to print at 400 lpi...

        So these files are 'active' in use, until they get archived. As you know most CDroms dont transfer all that fast (except the true 72x one that used what, 7 beams?) so moving them on/off media is a bit of a pain...

        Anyways, Digital is fun, but I still love my AgX.
  • I think Slashdot does this to make me feel bad about recent computer purchases. That 200 I threw at the 120 GB HD sounds soooo good now. *sigh* Oh well.
  • With drives getting so big, I am starting to wonder whether compression is even worth the while. You could rip your CDs to disk, without any patent infringing compression techniques and save processor cycles in the process.

    One market that would really appreciate these drives is home movie making. With digital video cameras becoming more affordable, and more popular, these drive will be great for storing your whole library. Especially, considering that the price of DVD burners are unnecessarily high, as is the media and add to that the lack of industry wide standards (as opposed to one company wide standards).
  • Anything that can be used for sex and something else, will be used for sex.
  • Why couldn't the sqeeze an extra 22 GB onto the drive so buying three would get me an even terabyte?

    Not that I have any use for much beyond 10 GB, but hey...
    • How do you simply "squeeze" an extra 22 GB onto the drive? The platters have a well-defined fixed capacity.
  • Can't anyone come up with something more creative or interesting? I mean, if you actually need 320 GB drives to back up your pr0n collection, you've crossed over from pastime into obsession. That's more pathetic than it is funny.

  • Problems with huge amounts of HDD space. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mr_Icon ( 124425 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @10:12AM (#4228290) Homepage

    Backups.

    I work at a University, where a lot of infrastructure support is geared towards research. Physicists like to collect enormous amounts of data, but they also expect us to be able to back it up and store monthly archivals going back three years.

    It's relatively cheap to put up a nice raid-5 external scsi storage chassis -- about 1Tb of space would cost slightly over $10k. Most research groups can easily come up with this amount of money, however we end up turning them down because we cannot afford to back up that much data. Tape drives are NOT cheap. Tapes are NOT cheap either. Moreover, while drive capacities have been increasing steadily, tapes haven't been able to catch up at all -- AIT3s are currently 100G uncompressed, and with the data physicists like to produce, we cannot rely on the 2:1 compression to hold true. To be able to back up 1Tb of data we would need at least 8 tapes and at least an 8-tape changer.

    Add to this 30-60 AIT3s for daily backups (~$5k), plus 8x12x3=288 AIT3s for a 3-year monthly archival storage, and you quickly run into SUBORBITAL amounts of money which research groups expect us to come up with. I mean, we're talking ~$10k for the 8-tape changer, and ~$25k for tapes. The fact that it takes us ~$40k to back up $10k worth of storage is something that a lot of people don't realize, especially not the faculty.

    • Backup Costs (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ansible ( 9585 )

      I ran some numbers on this recently. I was looking just at DLT vs. VXA. All prices US Dollars. This doesn't include the price of the drive, because that is relatively minor.

      For VXA-1, tape costs about $2/GB, retail price (you may be able to do better).

      For DLT-IV, tape costs about $1.4/GB.

      For VXA-2, tape costs about $1/GB. About the same for AIT-3.

      If you can find decent and not too expensive hot-swap drive carriers, those 320GB drives at $300 USD almost start looking good for backup media themselves! They could be close to $1/GB if the carriers aren't too expensive.

      All that above was uncompressed storage. Compression can cut those prices in half if you can use it with your data.

      HDs can backup data real fast, especially if you're using rsync. The problem is the drives themselves are more fragile than tapes. Though you can easily damage a tape by dropping it too (especially DLTs). Tapes are a bit better in terms of temperature range. Dunno about long-term archival storage. CDs or some other kind of optical would be a better bet than any kind of magnetic media for long-term.

      • Re:Backup Costs (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TFloore ( 27278 )
        Blockquoteth the poster
        CDs or some other kind of optical would be a better bet than any kind of magnetic media for long-term.

        I agree with this, but want it stated more clearly.

        Pressed CDs can be better than magnetic for long-term. This excludes any kind of writeable CD format, like CD-R or CD-RW. If you want long-term storage for CD, pay to get a pressed CD on aluminum. Not a burned CD on organic dye. There are companies around that will do very small production runs for backup/archive for a not-too-unreasonable cost. (That "not-too-unreasonable" assumes your data is significantly important to you.)

        It's worth it.

        It's interesting seeing the difference between "offline storage", "backup" and "archive" stuff. It's mostly driven by how long the data has to last. Couple of months, couple of years, couple of decades, is basically how it goes.

  • Lots to lose (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @10:29AM (#4228423) Journal
    Just think how much data you can lose in a single drive failure now! Good luck backing it up without going broke.

    • Re:Lots to lose (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Azog ( 20907 )
      Backups are easy. Get two drives. Spend $100 bucks to get a firewire card and IDE-firewire external case.

      One 320 GB drive in the computer. One in the external firewire case. Every few days, mirror from the internal to the external, and then put it back in the safe.

      Really, it isn't rocket science. What's the problem?

  • what really bugs me... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ultramk ( 470198 ) <{ten.llebcap} {ta} {kmartlu}> on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @11:33AM (#4229078)
    about /. at times like this, some people are incapable of admitting that they have a failure of imagination when it comes to evaluating the usefulness of technology like this.

    Do you need 320GB for your open source projects? Of course not. However, there are *tons* of valid reasons to need this kind of space.

    1. DVRs: store hundreds of hours of video. All fair use.

    2. Photoshop. Many of the projects I work on generate files in the hundreds of megabytes. Very high resolution. Often projects run to a few gigabytes. Home use? It is for me.

    3. Archival. For years, I've had to purge old projects off to CD, and just delete them altogether when I was getting tight on disk space. Now, with modern 160GB+ drives, I can have everything at hand. Forever.

    4. iMovie. 'Nuff said.

    5. ??: Who knows? No one's ever been able to put this kind of storage into people's hands before for this kind of money. Who knows what we'll come up with in a few years?

    ...and as for the "but there's no way to back it up" whiners. Oh, please. Use your imagination. Here's the system I use:
    (1) 160GB internal drive for daily use.
    (2) 160GB external firewire drives, one of which I use for incremental backups of the main drive, nightly. The second I store at an off-site location, and bring in once a week or so to back up the main drive directly, also incrementally. Both external drives are only connected during the backup procedure, and disconnected afterwards.

    Perfect? Of course not, no system is. But it's safe enough for what I'm doing, and protects against the things that scare me most: 1. catastrophic drive failure, and 2. fire, theft, etc.

    Come on, it's a procedural problem, not a technology problem.

    Frankly, I think tape drive suck. Most of the time, you don't find out if they're working or not until it's too late. With my system, I can just plug the drive in, and check out the files. And what if you just need that one file which you accidently threw away? Easy on an HD, pain on a tape. That and the wearing on the heads leads to a limited life span, tape and drive...

    of course, all this is IMO...

    m-

  • Price point (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TechnoWeenie ( 250857 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @01:16PM (#4230202)
    Just a little clarification on the price. The announcment is for a new family of drives, the "MaxLine". The prices for this family of drives _starts_ between $300 and $400. The drive capacities go _up to_ 320GB (5400rpm Maxline II) and 250GB (7200rpm Maxline Plus II).

    The announcement does not state that the 320GB drives will be priced between $300 and $400.

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