Storage stagnation

[ViRaL1]

Seagate is has been stuck at 200GB, Western Digital has been stuck at 250GB and Maxtor has been stuck at 300GB. The only company so far to make a jump (400GB) is Hitachi, and the rest don't seem to be following to closely behind. Has anyone heard anything to the contary? I'm looking to upgrade my storage but Hitachi 400GB drives are still around $1/GB vs about $.50/GB when you can catch rebadged Maxtor's 250GB drives for $130.

[Tommyknocker]

I heard the Terrabyte Barrier has been broken some time ago.

[holistic]

I heard the Terrabyte Barrier has been broken some time ago.

NOT

You are perhaps thinking of this dirty marketing bullshit.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118
The LaCie Bigger Disk RAIDed array (There is debate on this and it is of course not mentioned in specs ! )

[Tommyknocker]

I heard the Terrabyte Barrier has been broken some time ago.

NOT

You are perhaps thinking of this dirty marketing bullshit.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118
The LaCie Bigger Disk RAIDed array (There is debate on this and it is of course not mentioned in specs ! )

Could you explain why it has you so upset? Is it a hard drive unit that hold a TB of storage, or not? What makes it dirty marketing?

[adam]

Its dirty marketing because all it is, is several smaller drives arrayed together and sold off as a super big drive. Granted, they package it up nice but you could probably built something similar yourself for much less.

[Tommyknocker]

Its dirty marketing because all it is, is several smaller drives arrayed together and sold off as a super big drive. Granted, they package it up nice but you could probably built something similar yourself for much less.

Interesting. I thought the smaller drives consisted of several disks configured on one top of another. If this is the case, there really isn't that much difference, in my opinion. It still is a unit that has terabyte storage capacity.

[ViRaL1]

It's not a single physical DRIVE per se. It's a RAID array, a logical drive unit. I already have 4 WD200JBs in my server using RAID-0, but I wouldn't call it an 800GB drive. I'd like to upgrade some of the storage in that system, but something tells me the LaCie Big Disk won't fit in my tower. 181GB SCSI drives have been around for some time, as well as SCSI controllers that accept up to 15 drives, but I wouldn't say the 2.5GB barrier has been broken. It's true that smaller drives consist of one or more discs (platters), but that's quite different from something that's complete disc drives RAIDed together. I'm looking for single large capacity physical disk drives.

[freestyler]

It's an external unit. Firewire / USB 2.0

[ViRaL1]

Yes, I'd seen it a while back. Sorry, should have clarified. I'm looking for something internal. Something I can buy a few of and throw in my PowerEdge, RAID up and store tons of files (ISO, MP3 etc.) on.

[ViRaL1]

So I'm guessing 400GB is the limit and no one has heard of anything else on the horizon.

[rallynavvie]

Hey I'm glad hard drives aren't getting any bigger. Finally one PC component that I don't need to worry about getting the latest. Prices continue to fall for the existing hard drives and that's just fine with me. If you're using more hard drive space than what several 200-250GB hard drives can hold then you should be looking at swappable or external storage like I did.

[ViRaL1]

Not sure how practical either of those would be for server storage. Plus I like the advantages of striping. Conventional external storage doesn't seem very practical for software RAID. Not to mention that at the moment 250GB runs me about $120 (on sale @ Outpost.com) vs $200 - $250 for external storage in the same range. I have one 40GB in a firewire case and once in a blue moon I bump the cable and end up disconnecting it. That would be a huge headache for server storage.

Also, if you want the latest and greatest, check out the Hitachi 7k400. Don't forget that availability of larger drives is also what helps drive down the prices of smaller ones (like those skimpy little 200s I have in my server).

[rallynavvie]

IDE and server don't really belong in the same sentence. And any form of RAID for a server environment would be mirrored as servers are all about stability. If you're striping then that volume is also mirrored. Server market is mostly SCSI variants and some SATA now. And volume is not an issue for the server market either since their storage is generally rackmounted and holds a heckuva lot more than an ATX tower.

For those of us in the home market that need that sort of capacity external storage is a very valid option. I'm not talking rinky-dink little single drive enclosures. With 1394b you can get a 10-device external case and run them all off that single bus just fine. If needed you can slap a RAID controller in there somewhere too. Granite Digital has some options but mostly you can just build your own. Make it even better by using hot-swap trays for the drives and you've got near-unlimited storage options. I'd do this but the swap trays I've never needed access to everything at once on my 2+ TB of disk space.

[ViRaL1]

It's not a high-end server, it's a home-built system with a paltry P3 800 and 512MB ram, but I'm not using it as an app server or a web server. I'm mainly backing up media ISOs and MP3s to the IDE drives. I don't need blazing speed out of them and although I'm not mirroring, I do run RAID-5 (when all 4 drives are functioning ). I don't really have much use for hot-swap, since I'd like to be able to take full advantage of all available storage (sans my parity drive). Anything ultra important or frequently accessed goes on my PowerEdge with 2 73GB 10K Fujitsus runing @ U320. Sometimes I do stream ISOs over wireless to my laptop, but I've never had any problems with that. The GraniteDigital equipment seems pretty nice, but a bit pricey for my needs.

[rallynavvie]

Oi, all those IDE drives asking your system what the heck they're supposed to be doing... I don't think I could handle it. SCSI is so nice with its onboard controllers, they don't tap system resources anywhere near as bad as IDE. You'll start noticing it around 8 HDDs. Granted a larger drive would solve this problem somewhat. I better solution would be to get more affordable SCSI systems on the market.

[indolikaa]

What about a NAS rack?

[fmctm1sw]

I've heard the return rates on drives > 120GB are rather high. Maybe that has something to do with it...

[piano632]

Just when you thought hard drives had pretty much reached the limit...

Seagate is coming out with 250, 300, and 400 GB drives this fall (and 100 GB notebook drive). Some will even have 16 MB cache. Don't know what the price will be, but I'm guessing less than the Hitachi. I also heard Seagate is upping their warranty to 5 years!

http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2170,00.html

[rallynavvie]

What about a NAS rack?

What's that? Did I just hear the sound of money blowing away into the wind?

They're nice but they are $$$. If you could get a bridge board/controller for that you could set up your own with an ATX or rackmount case. I can't recall if I've seen the bridge boards around though.

[ViRaL1]

I'd probably go with something like this before a NAS.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4133165412&ssPageName=MERC_VI

May wait for FW800 though.