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Data Storage Hardware

1.6TB In a Shoebox, If You've Got the Money 359

Posted by timothy from the incrementalism dept.
zmcnulty writes "While not exactly a technological marvel in itself, IO Data Device's new 'HDZ-UE1.6TS' exemplifies the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities -- it's an external hard drive setup offering a total capacity of 1.6TB. Not much larger than four 3.5" hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space. Here's the Japanese press release." (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)
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1.6TB In a Shoebox, If You've Got the Money More

1.6TB In a Shoebox, If You've Got the Money

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  • Obligatory pr0n comment (Score:5, Funny)

    by syntap ( 242090 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:52AM (#10962892)
    But seriously... with this and an optical data line, running your own household Usenet server starts to become practical.

  • Creative paperweight... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:52AM (#10962894)
    Seems to me like this will be one of those pieces of equipment we will all "laugh at" next fall. I mean the size is good and all... but it is huge.

    Sorta reminds me of the 270gb MaxAttach file storage unit I have sitting in my rack @ work. The thing is huge... but 3 years ago it was "modern." Now I can buy a 400gb SATA hard drive that is 1/20th the size and has even MORE space.

    Infact -- speaking of which -- with SATA getting bigger and bigger this thing is a "waste of money."

    • Re:Creative paperweight... (Score:5, Informative)

      by saintp ( 595331 ) <{stpierre} {at} {nebrwesleyan.edu}> on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:31AM (#10963254) Homepage
      Infact -- speaking of which -- with SATA getting bigger and bigger this thing is a "waste of money."
      Right on. This past weekend, I priced out a 2.5 Tb roll-your-own NAS box from Newegg for about $2500. Why would I spend $400 more for 900 Gb less?

      • Hot Swap? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) *
        Right on. This past weekend, I priced out a 2.5 Tb roll-your-own NAS box from Newegg for about $2500.

        Question for the audience: Does the 2.6 kernel support SATA hot-swap yet? I know you can get add-in boards that present virual SCSI hot-swap for plenty of money, but I'd like to do it with cheap controllers.

        I'm pretty darn happy with XServe RAID [apple.com] under linux but I'm always watching for the cheap alternative.
      • Because your NAS box does take way more space on your desk? Not that _I_ would even cosider buying this overpriced POS.

        Here (http://www.century.co.jp/products/suto/goodfaith . html) is a four drive enclosure that I saw selling for about 24000 yen - 230 US bucks or so. Add your own 400GB HD for about US$ 350 a piece. The nice thing about these boxes is that you can select whether you want the drives seen as one big drive, or as individual drives.

        I have the 2HD version and I couldn't be happier.
    • Exactly. I think I'll wait 2 years and buy a 1.6TB drive at BestBuy for $149.

  • Recent trend? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:53AM (#10962896)
    the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities

    This is a recent trend?

  • internets (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:53AM (#10962899)
    how many internets can this hold?

  • couldn't you just buy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by hsmith ( 818216 )
    6 250gb hd's a good controller for ~$1200? what is the point of this besides having another toy?

    • Re:couldn't you just buy (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Forge ( 2456 )
      400GB SATA drives are $355 each (See price watch.com).

      A custom microITX Motherboard (With onboard SATA RAID and a reasonable amount of memory plus some kind of embedded OS in FLASH rom can be built for under $300.

      Add a $30 custom case and 5 of these drives and these guys are making $600 a pop above retail. Not bad really.

      My biggest surprise actually is that Dell doesn't sell such a box. Mr.. Dell said in more than one interview that they are in the business of retailing other peoples innovations after

  • Hmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:53AM (#10962903)
    But then where do I put my shoes?

  • $2900 = $1500 for prettiness? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stupidfoo ( 836212 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:54AM (#10962907)
    Hmm... $2900 for 1.6TB of storage? And no ethernet? Why not just build your own NAS unit that has the same amount of storage, includes ethernet, and would cost you about $1200-$1400? You could even put it in a fancy case for that price.

  • Sheesh.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by MHleads ( 751029 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:55AM (#10962915)
    Supported operating systems are Windows Me, 2000 and XP.

    It doesn't support any of unices.
    • Well of course it doesn't support any of the Unices...

      At 1.6 TB, it's just a home backup solution. I'd never use it at work! :)

    • Is it just me, or is there a tendency to say that hardware supports Windows, but is supported by Linux/Unix? As if the only thing that keeps Windows stumbling onwards is a big pile of hard drives and sound cards propping up its carcass...

    • Re:Sheesh.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:33AM (#10963272)
      Who would have a use for this type of storage, yet would at the same time run Windows Me?

  • LaCie has 1.6TB external as well (Score:5, Informative)

    by Schweg ( 730121 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:55AM (#10962923)
    LaCie has an external FireWire800/USB2 external drive available for about $1000, see here [lacie.com].

  • So? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by digitalamish ( 449285 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:55AM (#10962926)
    With the cost of IDE hard drives dropping, you could get 4 300 Gig IDE (or SATA) hard drives, and put them in an external case. I think you could shave a $1000 off that price. Even better would be if it was a network storage device.
    • The lowest price on pricewatch for a 300 gig SATA is $198, so you could shave a lot more than $1000 off that price. They've got 400 gig ones too, but they're $355 right now. You could still slap 4 of them in your system for a lot less than $2900.

      I want to build a MythTV PVR with around 1.6TB of storage sometime next year. That'd also give me a nice centralized location to stash my MP3s and stuff, too.

    • Even better would be if it was a network storage device.

      Not unless it has a gigabit port. Firewire 400 has 4x the bitrate, Firewire 800 has 8x the bitrate of ethernet.

  • If it's 1.6TB... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Slayback ( 12197 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:55AM (#10962927)
    Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?
    • > Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?

      You missed the sub-text: "0.4TB of complimentary porn included"

    • Then why does it clearly say 1.2TB on the front of the case?

      I'm sure you already knew this, but obviously they figured it looks the same as an older model of the same line, seen here: http://www.iodata.jp/news/2004/12/hdz-ue.htm [iodata.jp] You can also see how much you save by going for four 300MB drives (over $600 saved), or four 250MB drives (nearly $1900 saved) on that page.

      • You can also see how much you save by going for four 300MB drives (over $600 saved), or four 250MB drives (nearly $1900 saved) on that page.

        Screw all that - for that amount of storage, I'd require a raid setup. Wouldn't it suck to lose over 1TB of whatever it is you're putting in there?

    • Those were canadian TB's.....

      umm yeah...
    • 200 Gigabytes are for the online instruction videos. The other 200 Gigabytes are the promotional trailers required by the movie industry as compensation for piracy.

  • LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme (Score:5, Informative)

    by luiss ( 217284 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:56AM (#10962929)
    Only $2199. Been available for a while now, there's probably a Slashdot story about it too.
    http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1 [lacie.com]

  • 4 drives? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Woogiemonger ( 628172 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:56AM (#10962932)
    The device is basically an external hardware RAID implementation. I'm just wondering what they do to help the reliability of the data. I also wonder if you can choose to change the RAID configuration of the device. For people that don't care too much about the preservation of data, 4 drives running in parallel, at 4 times the speed would be kinda neat :)
    • Yes, but it would choke at the interface. Firewire and USB2 both have kinda limited transfer rates as far as drive thruput goes.
    • For people that don't care too much about the preservation of data, 4 drives running in parallel, at 4 times the speed would be kinda neat :)

      And four times the chance of hardware failure!

  • Boatload? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:57AM (#10962938)
    Not much larger than four 3.5" hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space.

    Stupid metric system... what's the conversion rate from boatloads to Libraries of Congress?

    • Stupid metric system... what's the conversion rate from boatloads to Libraries of Congress?

      You first have to convert boatload to volkswagen, and THEN convert to libocong. IIRC there are 6.3 volkswagens to the boatload, assuming these are metric boatloads. If they are Imperial boatloads, the equation becomes much more problematic (probably because of all the stormtroopers).

  • 1.6TB In a Shoebox, If You've Got the Money (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jumbo Jimbo ( 828571 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @09:58AM (#10962952)
    I'd rather have the $2,900 in a shoebox, thanks
  • LaCie has a 1tb unit based on 4x 250GB drives, and it acts just like a normal firewire hard drive, so it's compatible with anything. I'm sure they'll have a 1.6TB version if they don't already; they just need to drop in 4x seagate 400GB drives instead and they're done.

    They may already have this, but their site is nearly unusable right now for me.

  • You young wimpy whippersnappers! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:00AM (#10962973)
    $2900 for 1.6 TB!?! And you're complaining!?! Bah!

    I remember paying $2000 for a 100 MB SCSI disk when they first came out. And this was before that new-fangled internet thingy came out; so we didn't have on-line porn to fill up our disks with! No, siree. Back then, we had to fill up our hard disks with actual source code!

    Oh, where or where have all the real hackers gone, these days?

  • or... (Score:2)

    by IceFox ( 18179 )
    Simply get four hitachi 400GB drives ~$350 acording to pricewatch and at half the cost $1400 you can easily afford just about any basic computer to put them in with the left over money.

    Or

    Get 300GB drives for about ~$200 and for $2000 you can have 5 live drives and 5 backup, combine for 3TB or use your favorite raid setup and you still have $1000 left over for a box to hold the drives.

    Best of all with either of these options you can put in the system a real uplink. Skip the firewire/usb and go straight f

  • Who needs it? I'll get one from China (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:01AM (#10962984)
    Here's the Japanese press release." (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)

    Hahah who needs a hard drive? I don't have hard drives. i just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers. It's a lot cheaper.

  • Storage History (Score:3)

    by TJ_Phazerhacki ( 520002 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:06AM (#10963034) Journal
    My dad (Comp Tech for the USPS) talks about storage at his old college - they were one of the best systems in the state at the time, with a whopping 1.5 MEGABYTE storage. Give it a year or two - first comes the commercial application, then the compu-phile edition, then every Gateway and Dell is shipping with a TB Drive standard.

    The Law of steadily increased storage, much like moore's law, never ceases to amaze.

    • Yeah, I remember the news admin at umn.edu back in 1991 bragging up his new 1GB drive. "This will let us do 7-day retention on all the news groups and 3 days on binaries."

      Life does go on, doesn't it?

  • I fail to see why this is so special. Aside from the "shoebox form factor" this isn't anything one could not accomplish simply by buying a bunch of 250GB SATA drives, and a nice 6 or 8 port SATA controller.

    They may not be all that common anymore, but full-size tower cases still exist, and they exist for just this kind of reason.

  • Huge cost decrease (Score:3)

    by Ruzty ( 46204 ) <rusty.mraz@org> on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:12AM (#10963095) Journal
    Now, granted we did this with EMC storage which has caching SCSI controllers and ports for fibre attachment, but...

    About 4 years ago my former* employer bought about 1.5 terabytes in an EMC cabinet for about $3,600,000.00. It was a cabinet of 18Gig 10K rpm drives. Yes, they paid a steep markup, but it's still insane compared to the equivalent quality gear available at over a 100 fold decrease in price. Going cheap, like the device in the article or a LaCie bigdisk, would be about a 1,000 fold decrease.

    * They blew through $80 million in VC money in under 3 years. About 10% of that went to EMC for gear that never saw a bit of data stored on it or routed through it. I'll never work for another startup again...
    • Funny worked at a startup 4 years ago and EMC tried to get my fired for not buying there 3.6 Mill 1.5 TB POS. Then the sales guy went to the I'm going to loose my job if you dont buy it. They also took the your just not testing it correctly stance (was testing through through a server to a load farm with copies of real world work)

      Never ever buy something from EMC they fired there engineers years ago it;s a sales and marketing company. That and the fact they trust embeded windows to run the clarion line
  • Like the coyote. You finaly obtain it.

    But then have that sick realization of "How are you going to back up this bad boy?"
  • Okay, so two of them to have 1.6T in mirror (not much else to do with this for data protection I guess, it beeing seen as 1 large HDD) would be ~$6000.

    Ummkey. So 8 pieces of Seagate 400gb would be around $3000-3500 and I Raid them anyway I wish.

    Crap for gold, that's what this is.

  • Black Friday, CompUSA had 400 Gb drives for $290 after rebates. That's about $900. So is an external case worth an additional _2_grand?
  • I have not had the time to investigate this, but for the longest time I have wanted to be able to make a linux machine look like an external FireWire/IEEE 1394 hard disk.
    The point of this would be that I could put all the drives I want in a cheap case, with a cheap mobo and ieee 1394 card and 'serve' as many HD's as I could fit into my case and configure into a raid array as a large disk. RAID 1 and/or 5 drive enclosures that accomplish this seem to run at over $1200, not including the disks.
    I've poked arou
    • Why don't you just make it a fileserver?

      If you are getting a cheap mobo, you'd be limited by PCI bandwidth anyway, unless you're serving stuff from RAM.

    • New macs have "Target disk mode" which you can boot your expensive computer in a special mode and make it look like a hard drive. Usefull for transfering to/from notebooks via firewire at high speeds.

      Apple also did ip over firewire.

      I don't know if linux supports any of these things but it might be worth looking into.

      FWIW bought a 2 bay firewire drive box ($100), because the cases are cheaper than the "computer as drive" solution. The dirves show up separately though. Its not to bad speed wise either. Not

  • At last some competition... (Score:4, Funny)

    by CPM User ( 582899 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:16AM (#10963130)
    for /dev/null ...
  • but being the first kid on the block to have this hot-rod of a storage solution is worth it to some. I remember paying that kind of money in 1984 dollars for a Mac Classic with 20 Mb of HD and 1Mb of memory...its all relative
  • "(At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)" ...or £495 :P

  • cheap stuff (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sai Babu ( 827212 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:25AM (#10963205) Homepage
    160gig maxtor have been as low as $30/each (closer to $37 incl tax) after rebate. For about $1500-$1600 total you can put 20 of them together in 3 sets of 5 plus 5 spares and have 1.9TB of RAID. Yes, it costs more for power. About the same as my 5 x 9gig 5.25" 70GB FDDI attached array run by a SPARC20 that cost almost $25k back in the day...

    A couple of years ago I duplicated the system I sold for $500k that incorporated this array, a FDDI switch, and a half doz SGI Indigo 2's for less than $1000. Really underscores the adage that when it comes to computing, if you don't need it now, don't buy it now.

  • Those Crazy fortunes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @10:27AM (#10963223) Homepage Journal
    How appropriate that the quote at the bottom of the page for this article is:
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
  • Actually, you can pick up the LaCie that numerous others have mentioned for about $1850. Just Froogle it for an assortment of sources.

  • Will this just let my TiVo record for the rest of my life? After all, making decisions on what to delete is just sooo stressful.

  • Media backup (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MadEmperor ( 823313 )
    Everyone is going overboard about how this external unit is overpriced, however there are more things to consider than price.

    1. Many people have hundreds of gigs of movies in the form of divx, and would like to make a portable backup to travel.

    2. Building a cheap pc with internal hds is not always practical. It would have a much higher chance of breaking with all the extra parts, use more power, not be easy to move.

  • I see these things all of the time on internet, but what strikes me is that these little boxes never make use of raid-5, even the ones from lacie fail to have redundant drives inside. So if one of the internal drives fails you lose - all - of the data.

    It's nice to have an external 1.6tb disk, but not when you're forced to make 1.6tb backups (possibly having to buy a second one). What's the point then in having a 1.6tb databomb, chances that one drive fail are multiplied by the number of drives in these uni
  • "IO Data Device's new 'HDZ-UE1.6TS' exemplifies the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities -- it's an external hard drive setup offering a total capacity of 1.6TB."

    Backup??? My p0rn collection will take up at least 3 of those.

  • WiebeTech RT5 (Score:2, Informative)

    by silicon-pyro ( 217988 )

    WiebeTech [wiebetech.com] also has a product, the RT5 [wiebetech.com], that has 2TB of storage. The price is much higher though. With this model, you can choose the RAID 0-5, and hot-swap the drives. They also purport to support Windows XP, 2K, Mac OS X, and Linux via dual Firewire 400/800 connections.

  • RAID 0 = your data is vulnerable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @12:55PM (#10964702) Homepage Journal
    These 4 disks are striped (RAID 0), which is great for performance, but if any of the drives fails, you lost all the 1.6 TB of data. Given that there are 4 drives in the enclosure, your chances of a disk failure are about 4 times higher than that of a single drive.

    Bear in mind that typically, these disk enclosures for home use have poor ventilation, so the likelyhood of a drive failing is higher than with the PCs internal drives.

    For me, the odds don't seem good. I would much rather have RAID 1 + 0 (two mirrored disksets that are then striped) with half the capacity but better protection from data loss.

    This is precisely the reason why I am holding off from buying one of these disk boxes, even though I like the idea of having a place to store all my CD images - and more.

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