OK, my 360 Gig External Firewire drive is down to slightly less than 80 Gigs. At this rate I will be doing well to get past Christmas. Which is why I'm always amused to see articles saying that you'll only need a few Terabytes to record all your stuff for a lifetime...
In any case, I know I don't want a SAN, and even a NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a little expensive (about $8K for 1.5 T). Is there anyway to get a Terrabyte or two (or more) for $1K? I won't be capturing to that storage, but I will be playing so it can't be TOO slow.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
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OK, a RAID array certainly sounds like an option. But then that would imply buying a system that supported one, and getting some appropriate HDs. Can you recommend anything in particular?
Thanks,
Ewan -
IDE raid controller and 4 250GB drives. Plus one big power supply! Promise Technology makes at least one raid card. If you search for IDE raid, you should find some others. You do understand that if you lose one drive, the entire set of info will be gone, right? At least unless you get into more expensive forms of raid.
Just a question, why do you need so much storage? Don't you have something to burn the info onto? Seems like a DVD burner would be a better choice.Hope is the trap the world sets for you every night when you go to sleep and the only reason you have to get up in the morning is the hope that this day, things will get better... But they never do, do they? -
Let's see... a DVD will hold 4.7 Gigs (4.4 Gigs in usual practice). So to get a Terabyte onto DVD would take about 230 DVD-Rs, and a fair bit of shuffling
As far as what I have, about three years of home videos and a couple years worth of programs backed off my TiVO so that I don't overrun it. Granted both sets of material are probably stored in a larger format than necessary to insure quality, but trying to reduce the quality and still keep the videos acceptable does not seem to save that much - and just puts off the inevitable.
On the other hand, I did a little searching, and evidently it IS possible to get a 300DVD changer at:
http://www.crutchfield.com/cgi-bin/ProdView.asp?s=0&c=6&g=54500&I=158DVPX875&o=m&a=0&cc=01&avf=N -
I guess I just don't see the reason for keeping it all as live random access files. I would think authoring it to dvd would be better. But, check out the IDE raid systems any way, you might be able to build what you need for about $1000, depending on the drives you use.
Hope is the trap the world sets for you every night when you go to sleep and the only reason you have to get up in the morning is the hope that this day, things will get better... But they never do, do they? -
EwanG,
Your details show 180 gig drive. Is that a single drive?
If so, is there room in your case to add more, using an ATA card for 4 more devices? Raiding them is not neccessary, and you wouldn't lose all the data if one failed.
If you don't have the room to physically do this, do you have a 5 1/4 bay, or 2, open into which you can install a removeable tray device?
I used to use those when drives were in the couple gig range.
You could always insert one, fill it up, put in a new drive in another tray and fill that up.
It's not neccessary to always have all the movies, etc, instantly accessible, is it? You want to watch October 2003 captures, install that drive.
The units are about 30USD complete, insert trays, abour 15.
98, I always had to install with machine off, boot up. Might be able to hotswap with XP. -
If you don't have a big enough case, buy a bigger one! or if you have space by the side of the one you're using, just place the HDD's in that (probably with their own powersupply) and cut holes into the sides of both cases, and run the IDE cables through.
You could always archive the material to magnetic tapes. don't know for sure about capacities, but it wouldnt suprise me if they were 150gb+ these days. -
Originally Posted by The village idiot
250GB drives are around $260 each. Plus the cost of a RAID card at $40-70. Then the cost of the rest of the computer at around $250-300 for bare bones and a KVM switch ($70) to avoid another monitor. Then add shipping."A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct."
- Frank Herbert, Dune -
I was just going for the card and drives in my estimate.
What about firewire raid, or stripe sets? CAn you get full 400Mbps out of 4 drives all in a stripe with this? Something I've been meaning to look into, but haven't had the money for the drives and cases.Hope is the trap the world sets for you every night when you go to sleep and the only reason you have to get up in the morning is the hope that this day, things will get better... But they never do, do they? -
I was just out looking for DLT to check prices, capacities, etc.
The biggest I found were 110GB native, 220GB compressed 2:1.
Bad news is they run about 100USD per 100GB, 1000 per terabyte.
That's about what you'd pay for Hard Drives, and they are DLT, Digital Linear Tape, sequential, have to fast forward, as you would with your VHS tapes.
I guess there is a scheme to get faster access, but I don't think as fast as a Disk Drive.
And, the cost of the drive is, to me, astronomical.
BTW, if you decide to convert to downsize all that stuff you have, I hope you're young. Sounds like a couple years work.
Cheers,
George -
As I continue my search, I seem to keep finding interesting stuff. For a rather interesting combination of some of the solutions mentioned above, check out this:
http://www.firewiredirect.com/firewire/products/RAID_V.shtml -
I think FireWire is limited by the PCI bus speeds so it certainly can't get to 400MBps yet. Perhaps Apple will break that barrier since they have it onboard. I can't recall what speeds PCI-X will attain but that may get it closer.
I don't think XP supports hotswapping any more than other OSes. It's mostly a hardware issue. I've seen hot-swapping trays that are pretty expensive because they manage the hotswapping somehow. I think the cheaper ones are for easy drive swapping after shutdown. It would be pretty cool to make a boot drive on a cold-swap drive like that. Run Linux and Windows on the same machine if you needed to, or even older versions of Windows.
I've been shopping around for external RAID enclosures just to house more SCSI drives and for the life of me I can't understand why a 4-drive enclosure with a 250W power supply and an interface card (not a RAID controller) goes for $200. For that you could get a nice half-tower ATX case that can hold more than twice the drives. Is the interface card expensive or something? I know for SCSI it's basically just a SCSI cable with a female plug outside the case and 4 male plugs in the case for the drives (plus the power cables). That seems a bit absurd to me. Still, it is an option if you want more storage and don't have room for it. -
Well an onboard Firewire controller (which a lot of new mobos have these days) would be plumbed into the northbridge, wouldn't it? Obviously a PCI card would be limited by the bus, but i don't think an onboard controller would.
for the life of me I can't understand why a 4-drive enclosure with a 250W power supply and an interface card (not a RAID controller) goes for $200.
/geek -
Most onboard devices are still run through a PCI bus, there just isn't a physical card and slot involved.
A man without a woman is like a statue without pigeons. -
sounds like you need 4 large drives with a computer attached. buy a cheap pc with 4 big muthas and then network it to your present pc.
How or when are you ever going to watch all this stuff??Corned beef is now made to a higher standard than at any time in history.
The electronic components of the power part adopted a lot of Rubycons. -
I was thinking more like 4 WD external drives all chained together. The othe all in one box drives are expensive. But super l33t.
Form follows function in my book. It should not look cool, just work well. That's why I don't really think very much about adding neon lights and crap. Just give me a box, and put neat things inside, hidden from view. But I digress....
Why not buy one of these http://www.schange.com/Products/Massive_Storage/main.asp
We have one at work. 6 nodes, 12 drives each node, 36GB drives... OR 2532 GB storage. Ok not really, they are raid 5+ so some storage is parity. We can lose one entire node, and never see a problem. We can lose a node, and use another to build a new node, and still see no problem. Ours runs on NT4 for the control box, and NT3.5 in cluster config, for the nodes. The new ones run something else. This is what your cable on demand is using (well a variation). They have those listed too.Hope is the trap the world sets for you every night when you go to sleep and the only reason you have to get up in the morning is the hope that this day, things will get better... But they never do, do they? -
Another option is to upgrade to firewire 800 (1398b) see the following post for more details https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175948
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