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30GB and 50GB Removables 109

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bigger-faster-better dept.
After yesterdays bit on the 10 gig removables, Chad Pommiss wrote in to tell us about "A Philip Electronics offshoot named OnStream that has developed 30GB and 50GB removable drives, based on "Advanced Digital Recording", boasting variable data rates of 1 or 2MB/second (3GB/hour). Parallel, SCSI and IDE/ATAPI versions are available from $299" Ok now that is what I wanna keep my MP3s on.
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30GB and 50GB Removables More

30GB and 50GB Removables

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  • Cheap storage (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For $100 you get 3 cartridges (90 gigs!). Not too shabby, even if it isn't random access.

  • 30GB compressed, not native (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think it's a bit misleading, since it's really only 15GB without compression. However, their comparisons to other formats (Zip, etc.) is a native comparison, so it's fair (I was just a bit confused as to why a 30GB disk was the same as 15 1GB disks...)
  • I think the reason you haven't seen a writeup yet is because they still haven't gotten any drives in the retail market. They are shipping to OEMs the IDE internals. The retail versions of IDE internal, SCSI int/ext, Parallel, USB, IEEE 1394, are not shipping exactly now. They say soon. I will probably have some sort of writeup somewhere when I get my SCSI external.
  • I thought they gave those kinds of jobs to rhesus monkeys and such...

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • Who in their right mind is going to use this sketchy new media for their servers? Stick to something from the big boys who have a track record, not some random startup who has a new gadget.

    On that note, has anyone bothered to compare the internal 30 Gig to an Internal DDS-3
    drive? It feels WAY, WAY too much like a little
    bit more storage for a lot less reliability in the
    media.

    My solution, which I bought _2_ years ago:

    I have a DDS-2 autoloader which holds 4 DDS-2
    tapes. That's 16 gigs uncompressed and 32 compressed. Right around where this thing is.
    The media costs something like $10/pop, so that's
    $40 for 4. The transfer rate is right around
    that thing. The difference? My drive is 3 years
    old! How can this thing possibly be viewed as
    a revolution when my old tape drive has nearly
    the same specs?
  • Posted by sumanth:

    No good CD-RW's in scsi? ever hear of plextor? the "rolls-royce of cd-rom drives", I can't wait till the make DVD drives...
  • Unless you want to listen to your MP3s in the same order every time, you're screwed...
  • buy some DDS3 for $25. For $100, you get 60GB (uncompressed) storage on a tiny little tape that is probably more reliable.
  • What kind of nonsense is this? NO external SCSI version?
  • Never heard of a cassette player, have you?
  • I've got nothing against tape, it works wonders on big computers but this just looks like another "last storage device you'll ever need" and it's not particularly impressive. If it used DATs I might take notice..

    What we need are CDR juke boxes for backup, if I could drop a stack of 10 discs in and get a complete backup, I'd go for that. They are making archival grade CDRs now and you can read them anywhere...

  • Under development.. They say second quarter '99. Which should be soon now, I hope.. ;-P
  • Zips compressed? On the contrary -- they're ECCed. A raw Zip disk has a capacity of more than 100M, but thanks of the error correction codes they unly use most of that.

    -Billy

  • Wouldn't you know it. I ordered a SCSI travan tape drive about a 1 1/2 weeks ago and finally got it installed today. The media cost for these new tape drives is about the same for the TR-4s. Damn. On the bright side, the drive I got is about $400 cheaper than the cost of their internal SCSI drive.

  • Well, Yamaha and Sony make excellent ones, Plextor sell them, come to think of it, pretty well everybody makes decent SCSI cd-rw drives, quite a few at 6x write these days.

    For ultimate speed though, get the new Lacie 8x write 20x read cd-r drive :)

    and me with my humble Sony 4x write drive (which is extremely reliable)

    The Lacie DVD-RAM drives are excellent too, I've used a couple.
  • THat's what I forgot to say. The downside is that seek times are probably fairly wretched. Maybe the software could have a cache big enough to store a couple songs, and if your mp3 player was set for random, it would choose the next one early enough for the drive to retrieve it. But I agree, having to go from one end of the tape to the other probably would take a while.
  • Sounds like a pretty neat drive. It looks like the data transfer rates would be good enough for an mp3 type application. 2 MB per second should easily handle mp3, shouldn't it? It also looks like it's much easier to use than a regular tape drive, although how reliable is company hype? The only problem I see is that there don't seem to be any drivers or programs to interface it for linux (or Mac in my case) Let's hope they see those two as profitable investments. This makes me rethink an Orb drive. It may not be quite as fast, but at least it sounds like they're available to buy. 30Gig for $40 isn't too bad either.

    Erik
  • ... and it worked just fine (and a jumbo-250 is not very fast :) !

    I might be wrong, but I think you'd get away with a transferrate in the vincinity of 130kbit/s for a normal 128kbit/s mp3..

  • Why are they targetting the Windows market?

    We'll get back to that in a minute.

    Are there that many Windows systems that need tape backup that it makes more sense to do Windows first and Linux/Unix second? I thought servers with high data requirements were still predominantly Unix boxes, though perhaps they aren't targetting servers. Who is their target market then?

    Sad reality that Linux people like to avoid is that there are a LOT of NT boxes out there. Yes yes, we know you don't like NT, but the fact of the matter is, even if Linux is winning the server war or whatever, there's still this percentage out there that actually runs NT, whether you like it or not. So there's one market.

    Why are they targetting the Windows market?

    Users, baby! The other targer market is end-users who think they're power users. I mean, besides Intranets and shit, what does Joe Desktop need one of these for? Hell, what do I need one for? Still, it's cheap and it's sexy. Why not? I've got a credit card! Why target Windows? End users use Windows. Another reality.

    Yeah kids, I know you think Linux is great, but there's still a very large market of people who use Windows and spend money.
  • Right, and I'm annoyed a little too, cause I was the first one that mentioned the Onstream drives the other day, and have been a few other times. I have a few friends that support them, and I think they'd be great for temporary space relief on my hard drive, I could store my MP3s on them... (I do understand though that spooling MP3s off them is an iffy proposition.)

  • why is it that every time anyone makes a reference to windows, some clueless idgit has to say something negative?

    --bc
  • Great... Now we just need someone to write a driver so the DVD-RAM can be of any use under linux. No companies are going to release the specs for their drives, so what can we do? Unfortunately, the only OS the DVD-RAM drives I have seen will work with is Win98, so no thanks. There is no way in hell I will be getting one anytime soon.

    Personally, I wouldn't buy a DVD-RAM drive until Plextor makes one!
  • Umm....you realize that this is NOT a random access drive. It's just a stupid tape. That is the writing speed, not the reading speed. If you've ever had a tape, you would know that you could not use it as a mass storage device to read off of; you can only use it back stuff up.

  • Are you on crack? Storing mp3's on a tape drive would be a BAD idea. It'd take 5 minutes just to fast forward to the right part of the tape to find your song. And tape drives have lots of notorious problems (tapes STRETCH). Oh and BTW, they're advertising 30gig, which assumes 2:1 compression, so they're only 15gig and 25gig tapes.

    Anyway, cheap 15 gig IDE drives are cheap enough for me. ;)

    --Bob

  • Why not equip a PC with a DVD-RAM drive for recording, and a DVD-ROM drive for playback jimmied open to work with the mechanicals of one of those $250 home-audio 200-CD jukeboxes? Then you'd get 5GB per disk times 200 disks. A terabyte!

    Surely a terabyte of, gosh, nice 256-kilobit mp3s is enough for even a /. reader. At 256-kilobit sampling, that's about 8400 hours of music. At the more common but lossier 128 kilobits, it's over 16,000 hours. Yum.

    But me, if I needed that 16,000 hours, I'd rather just hook up multiple 200-disk changers to the same computer and stick with the higher sound quality. You could store all your indexing and CDDB playlists on a small $70 hard drive easily.
  • Oh boy, a tape drive that can store 30Gigs. BFD. The speed is nice, but it is still tape and thus only really good for servers. Don't get me wrong, this is an incredably useful task, but I need random access....
  • I have one of the "30 GB" models in my system here. It's actually 15GB uncompressed and it's phenominally slow since it *is* a tape drive with a *very* long tape. It comes included with software that makes it work like a normal drive. Every time you access it this way it takes up to 5 minutes to open the file you want.

    No, I haven't been able to get it to work with linux yet, but it does back up our entire windows network and seems pretty reliable.
  • Hope your system can keep up.
  • Call me anal, but the site did specify 1GB catridges and not 2GB. At least on the internal IDE page.



    "My friend, we are nothing but wings on the chicken of society" --Bricktoad
  • I totally missed that. That would makes these drives great for backups and what not, but not as an everyday drive. That is depressing. Oh well, I guess I'll have to stick to magnetic media for now.

    Kent
  • Could it be made external.. I have a external
    SCSI hard drive case that I took the hard drive
    out of to put it inside my case, could I put the
    internal SCSI in it? It shouldn't be a problem right except mabey for cutting the hole for the
    drive to stick through the front.

  • When you've got a product that has got dubious technical advantage over the competition, wouldn't you want to target a market that has a demonstrated preference for gee-whiz marketing over tech specs?
  • > But I agree, having to go from one end of the tape to the other probably would take a while.

    Agreed, but so would changing _thru_ 40+ CDROM disks. Or a dozen DVDROMs.
    This is 30 to 50 GB we are talking here. (1999)

    The mere change of 40, or a dozen optical disks would take a while more than an ADR tape. Bigtime.

    Seems more like a luxury media for MP3's. Plus a more totaly easy backup product = you do it better.

    Imagine the entire home collection of MP3s on a couple of tapes, which I leave unlocked in the future car, hoping I remember to leave them on the seat instead of the dash, so the Boing-a-delic color label I printed for them wont fade in the sunlight.

    Yes!
    The 50+ CD's (origionals!) on spring-break would be more error prone, and less fun, than jamming MP3 tunes from ADR tape in the convertible on the way to the beach with a date or three...Oh Yea!

    It's over: It's MP3.
    JoeT
  • Oh well, I guess I'll have to stick to magnetic media for now.

    Um. These drives are magnetic media.
  • I know this is 100% off topic, but are there any SCSI dvd-rams that also support cdrs. I don't care about cdrw, but I need cdr.
  • gzip saved 1% for me, bzip2 saved 1.53%. So, download mp3.bz2, save eleven seconds of download time! :) Anyway, I don't think mp3s will be replaced by something with better compression, unless someone comes up with a way to get something that's like 2x as good as gzip or bzip2. It will probally be replaced with something that does better encoding and can figure out how to drop out even more information that the human ear can't hear anyway.
  • If you're going to spend hundred of dollars to sroe your MP3s or anything else you need random access to look into M/O drives. The newest ones have up to 6 megs continuous transfer and up to 13 megs burst transfer. The disks come is plenty of sizes. Or CD-RW or DVD-RAM. Theres a new 40x cd that can read the entire CD (yes the ENTIRE) CD at 40x. It uses a beam splitter and some other gadgets to do this but it does, I've seen it personally. So record your MP3s on your CD-RW or CD-R and read the entire thing at 40x wich is about 6 megs per secong. At a dollar apiece for CD-R you can afford 26 gigs for the price of one of their 30 gig tape drives.

    Say no to tape.
  • Says you need Win95/98/NT.. useable under Linux?
  • I dont't mean to sound whiney or anything
    but this is amoung one of the many news stories
    I've sent him a while ago...

    either he didnt read it or is ignoring my
    submitted stories. If this is true, I'll stop
    putting forth the effort, i just wish he'd let
    me know

    -Z
  • I really like it here. I spend more time here
    than sleeping, but only a few of the best articles
    make it, so...

    possibly (suggestion) could CT or Hemos
    set up a page where all the articles that they
    got that werent good enough to make the main
    pages but were still interesting could be put.
    That way we'de have both more to read and feel
    like we were being heard more.

    I realize the man isn't a diety (yet) so he
    simply can't keep track of it all, but i would
    be curious to see what doesnt make the final cut
    for the front page.

    -Z

  • OK.

    Personal Observations

    1. Linear SCSI Tape. Hence obviously supported by standard SCSI Tape driver on Linux + *BSD.
    2. 15GB & 25GB Native capactity 8mm Digital Cartridges
    3. Fast Narrow SCSI-II - easy to hook up, easy to get interface boards for.
    4. Internal, but you can always buy an external SCSI enclosure and bung it into one of those.
    5. The 25GB model is "coming 1st quarter '99", umm... aren't we in quarter 2?

    BEGIN (* RANT *)

    I think this business with tape companies quoting "Compressed Capacity" is rather dirty and dishonest. The should always quote the Native Capacity due to the innefficiencies of Compression algorithms.

    Other thing I'll note, is that does anybody remember the older Exatape D8 Drives? 2.5GB & 5GB native capacities in a 8MM DAT not much larger than a 8mm Video cassette. These appear to be virtually the same, but with a longer tape.

    I wouldn't consider using it for anything that isn't streaming, but it would help me tonnes here at work for backing up our 20+ GBs of disk....

    END (* RANT *);

    -- XFire

  • DVD-RAM is available right now with 2.6Gig per side capacity, just as fast as one of these, and is random access. Yeah, it may not be as cheap ($500 for the drive, and $50 for a dual side 5.2G disc) but it's alot more practical.

    Gotta go with the 3-drive combo:

    Kenwood TrueX 52x CD-ROM (52x across the entire disc)

    Creative Labs DVD-RAM (2x DVD, 20x CD, and 5.2Gig removable storage!)

    HP SureStore 24/4/2 CD-RW (Read 24x, Write 4x, Re-Write 2x, good for "Legacy" CD-burning)

    Yeah, they're all IDE, but the Kenwood should be SCSI soon, I've seen a DVD-RAM SCSI, but it's slow and expensive, and no good CD-RW's are available in SCSI.

    I can't wait to actually get all three...

  • Unreliability of Pinnacle Micro product is unknown to me: after trying for over two years to obtain an engineering sample for eval, I gave up.
  • The tape vendors always quote capacity based on 2:1 compression. This does not apply to: zips, mp3, jpg, lha, or any other compressed format.

    Further, the speed is not exciting. 2MB/S is not that quick, and again assumes compressible data. For already compressed material, the rate will be 1MB/S.

    DLT is better, AIT is better, and they are both well supported.

    The answer we need is a good, reliable, and quick random access rewritable medium with lots of space. Pinnacle Micro has the Apex, Castlewood has the Orb, Iomega has Jaz. All are better than tape.

    Also, SCSI disk solutions of every sort mean immediate support by pretty well any OS.
  • YOu misread... they're using 8 /millimeter/ tapes. The data for the 25/50GB SCSI version says 192 tracks... so I assume its a serpentine reading formation. (or a 192 track head, which I kinda doubt ;)
  • We're working with the OnStream guys to get these drives supported under Linux. As before, we have to do driver work since these ADR drives use a slightly different command set and tape format than normal QIC-157 ATAPI or SCSI drives.

    Stay tuned to the LINUX-TAPE list at VGER for notices about progress.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • However, keep in mind that the IDE internals that are currently being shipped can be obtained by the rest of us. If you do a quick search on pricewatch you'll find a few places on the web that have them for individual purchase.
  • I work for a large retailer, and we were sent 4 of these things to test to see if we wanted to sell them. 2 were parallel, and 2 were IDE. Believe it or not, the parallel were much faster than the IDE (I got about 25 megs/minute with the parallel vs. about 8 with the IDE), so these things have some issues. It was fast to write to, but not from. Get a HD or CDRW/DVD-RAM if you're looking for MP3 storage... this drive is not the answer.

    Lazarus
  • Not Really, Compared to the amount of storage on the tape the overall access time for a given file will better than most other methods. I think its great for anything that is accessed sequentially (MP3, AVI,....). In particular I think that it would be useful for storing raw audio data prior to compression.
  • let's see if we can do this math: 2MB/sec * 3600sec/hr = 7200MB/hr 7200MB/hr * 1GB/1024MB = 7.03 GB/hr so, 2MB/sec isn't equal to 3GB/hr, but 1MB/sec is pretty close to it.
  • We can all go use pricewatch or something else to find good prices. I see nothing inovative about this, which is what Slashdot is supposed to be for. This thing is slow, and probably incompatable with everything else. If you're that cheap, get a used 8mm (Exabyte) drive for a few hundred, and you can use $5 video tape in it. Of course, the capacity and speed are only a significan fraction of this thing, but it is a lot cheaper to run, and at least there is more than one manufacturer making drives for it.

    On the other hand, I know places that give away 880K floppies for free... that's INFINATE speed and capacity for you dollar... sounds more like your speed.

  • Well, actually, a better site is http://www.spacemoose.com

    Far far funnier...oh, and if you look hard enough, you'll find out how I got my handle. :)
  • It shouldn't be too hard to get the SCSI model up and running under linux or on a mac. This thing is perfect for backing up servers so I'm sure that the company has support for real operating systems like linux or the popular PC unix variants in the works if not already available. Ditto for Novell support. Anyone serious about running a reliable and fast server doesn't even use NT anyway.
  • What a profound and insightful thing to say. Surely you are one of the sages of our time.
  • I saw two interesting points on their site:
    1) They are using 8-track tapes, and
    2) They are calling the 8-track R/W head technology revolutionary.

    I hate to pick nits, but since when is this revolutionary? All tape storage units worth their salt have 8+. MSb on the inside, and LSb's on the outside. Maybe the head size is smaller than before.

    That said, I do like the thought on keeping Foghat MP3s on a digital 8-Track cassette.

  • Ah, you are correct. The information on their media (check out their ECC [onstream.com] documentation) mislead me... it shows a pretty simple diagram illustrating an 8-track head.
  • It's still misleading. The newer Jazz drives store 2GB (no compression involved) so that should be 7.5 Jazz disks, NOT 15.

    btw. I'm surprised Rop, like many others mentioned, it's a bloody TAPE drive. Isn't it bout time you modify the msg a tadd?

    Breace.
  • Except it's NOT 30 Gb to 50 Gb, but rather 15 Gb to 25 Gb -- read the fine print. Tape drive manufacturers always use a 2:1 assumed compression and don't tell you that until you dig into your ads.

    This is bad because a lot of what I dump to tape (JPEGs, MP3s, ZIP files, MPEGs, etc.) is mostly uncompressable.

    If your talking CAD drawings, word processor or text docs, then it's more like 10:1 compression.

    We average about 1.2:1 compression on PCs and the servers at the office.
  • And I was just about to buy a new hard drive. Guess this answers my problem. With the IDE/ATAPI interface it should not be too hard to get it to work with linux (more all nighters ). But what would I do with 30 gigs...... Imagine all the useless junk I can aquire. My locatedb is going to be huge!
  • The different models of the tape drive's transfer rate vary from 2.5gb/hr to 7.2gb/hr. simple mistake. If it doesn't look right on slash just check the link.
  • I actually thought it was well funny. But thats just me (hey I'm a sick guy). If you dont like it, thats alright, ur allowed not to, dont visit it, excercise the back button.
  • They are building drivers for Linux!
    http://www.onstream.com/about/prod_faq.html#Linu x
  • OnStream has been toting their 50g backup drives for months now, but I called them and they won't even be available till mid May, even though every reseller pretends to have them. I think the important things to note is that with Scsi, back up speed is 7g/hour. That IS fast for $699. Sure, you can go spend 4 grand on a DLT IV, but I'd prefer not to.

    Also, the OnStream tape drive is meant for backups, not for playing your mp3s, but supposedly it should be decent for storing large digital video clips. This is also drag and drop software. Sure, the seek will suck, but its a lot more practical than just backup/restore drives.
    PDG--"I don't like the Prozac, the Prozac likes me"
  • Then you saw the 30gig version, not the 50. If you can find me a 50gig unit, I'll pay you.


    PDG--"I don't like the Prozac, the Prozac likes me"
  • I believe Lacie (http://www.lacie.com) have external SCSI DVD-RAM drives.
  • Looks more like 15 gigs. With the best lossless compressor (http://heroine.tampa.fl.us/split) maybe 20 gigs for $400. Swapping CD-RW's might be faster than tape, too.
  • It's actually 15 and 25G. They quote compressed figures and assume 2:1 ratio. Go gzip your mp3s and tell me the result :)

    On the other hand:
    "OnStream is working to qualify developers who are familiar with Linux to write drivers and tools to attach OnStream digital drives to systems running a Linux operating system. Initially, support for this solution will be from the community of Linux developers."
    So they aren't totally pointy haired ;)
  • These Philips [philips.com] guys are inventors of the CD.

  • "These drives are compatible with Microsoft® Windows 95?, 98? and NT?"
    I like how their use of Microsoft proprietary characters caused the meaning of the text to be improved.
  • Several things (most of which have already been said, but I thought I'd put them together):

    1) This is a tape drive. That means /linear/ access, and probably awful seek times.

    2) The sizes they list are compressed sizes; however, mp3s are already compressed. You probably wouldn't be able to squeeze much more than 15G on one of these tapes.

    3) The read speeds they list are native, which means compressed data will probably not be available this fast.

    Overall, this drive seems to be being hyped for something that it is not. Maybe it's a nice cheap fast 'solution' for backing up large servers and stuff, but for PC usage, it is much less practical.


  • Sony AIT (8mm) drives start at 25GB native, and the next generation will be 50GB native - and they do 5MB/sec - more than twice as fast. The only thing special about this thing is the price... Sony drives start around $2000 and $50 for the tapes. DLT has similar capacities and speed (there is a 35GB version too), and costs even more.
  • I agree that Linux hardware support is a beautiful thing. However, let us keep in mind that CmdrTaco is only trying to keep ./'ers aware of (arguably) cool, (again, arguably) new technology. Asking about Linux support is fine; however, saying, for example, that DVD writers suck simply because the specs aren't available yet is stupid. We are hopefully all aware that vendor support for alternative operating systems would be great; however, don't knock hardware for software problems. Winmodems suck because the hardware is crippled; DVD-RAMs rule because they write DVDs.

    Be nice to the hardware! The Matrox G200 is a good card. The kernel fb driver supports it. The G400 is cooler. Does the kernel support it? Does the answer make the card more or less cool?

    I'm saying, knock the companies for not providing drivers. Not the hardware.

    Any inaccuracies, inconsistencies, spelling or grammatical errors are purely the fault of your perception.

    Go see Matrix.
  • Not that I have any insider information on what CT does in his (dripping sarcasm) "copious" spare time, but let me offer an observation: there are only so many hours in a day to keep /. operational, let alone reviewing stories and trying to separate the duplicated submissions, post the best one, etc. As an example, a few days ago I submitted an item (no, I haven't seen it yet either) and there were more than 110 submissions pending. NOT BECAUSE ANYONE AT /. IS LAZY, but because we tend to overwhelm them with our responsiveness. (AKA, the /. effect)

    What I do know is that this site is (IMHO) improving rapidly. The new moderation system seems to promote layers of quality, and the better comments/commentors seem to rise to the top.

    My bottom line has been (suggestion for all to think about here) support /., keep coming back, do your best work in posting comments and submitting stories, and be patient with the guys at the back end.

    They ARE listening, and quality does seem to be rewarded here.

  • Question... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Sunday April 11, 1999 @02:41PM (#1939631) Homepage
    What a waste of alignment points... Oh well.

    This, as been aptly pointed out by many in the forum, is a tape drive, with uncompressed storage close to 15GB or 25GB on a variable speed media. Evidently it also has data write speeds up to 2mb/s, and currently supports only Windows solutions with Linux support soon, and other OSes such as Mac at a later date...

    Why are they targetting the Windows market? Are there that many Windows systems that need tape backup that it makes more sense to do Windows first and Linux/Unix second? I thought servers with high data requirements were still predominantly Unix boxes, though perhaps they aren't targetting servers. Who is their target market then?

    Maybe some clued in Windows sysadmin will be able to tell me differently, or someone will know of a use that begs for this solution in the large Windows desktop market, or perhaps the workstation market?

    AS

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