Craig's Musings

Way, way back in the technology time machine - Christmas 2004, to be precise, I set up a Promise VTrak 15200 with 15 400gb drives for my digital media home. 4.8 Terabytes (RAID 50 with a hot spare) seemed like an infinite amount of storage. Given what it cost, it freakin' well BETTER be infinite was my thinking at the time. Fast forward almost 3 years now, and I'm down to 480GB. My infinite storage space has vanished - I'm hoarding media files on my media center PCs because there is no space on my darned server. I have a ton of DVDs to archive still and I'm outta luck. I have to spend time cleaning out old crap off my storage array. I am almost out of storage on my 'infinite' storage device - how did that happen?!

When terabyte drives were announced, I figured that was the milestone to upgrade my storage world. But having had a double drive failure in my RAID 50 config (and as luck would have it, one drive failed in one RAID 5 stripe and one failed in the other) and having sat around biting my nails for a day and a half hoping the rebuild would finish before another drive failed, I was unwilling to move to terabyte drives (with 3+ day rebuilds once they were full) until RAID 6 was available. RAID 6 in hardware is the ultimate in coolness for large drives - 2 parity drives instead of 1, so you can sustain 2 drive failures and keep on ticking.

Tonight I did my monthly troll of Promise's web site to see if they had a 15+ drive RAID 6 appliance available, and sure enough, they did - the M610p is out, with 16 hot swap slots and support for RAID 6 and the Hitachi terabyte drive. And with the terabyte drives being only $329 from ZipZoomFly (a great price), the 17 drives I'd need (16 + a spare) would cost a mere $5,593. So with the M610p around $4000, all I need is $9,600 laying around to have 13TB of storage (2 drives for parity + a hot spare - never leave home without a hot spare in your storage array).

So it looks like I'm just gonna be almost out of storage for the forseeable future. Sigh. I hate waiting.

Posted by Craig at 10:10 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I bought my very first hard drive for $400. It was a 40mb drive that I put into an IBM PS/2 model 25 (How you gonna do it? PS/2 it!), replacing one of the two 720kb 3.5" floppy drives. I was never a PC person before that, but I had won my PS/2 in a drawing that IBM did on campus at the University of Waterloo, way way back when I was a grad student there. Summer of 1989, to be exact. That PC is what turned me away from Unix and MVS - I was THIS close to being a mainframe programmer.

Anyway, fast forward almost eighteen years. I just bought a hard drive for $400:

DAMN!!

Posted by Craig at 8:58 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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Now shipping from PC Connection. Oh, and while they're at it, Hitachi tossed on 32MB of cache. 8 times the memory I had in my first 386. Go figure.

Posted by Craig at 4:41 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I was ordering a 750gb drive for my Windows Media Center PC (now new and improved with with July 2006 CTP of Vista) (only $336 bucks, for gosh sakes), and discovered the you can get a 4GB SD card for $69.99 - and it is the same brand I am using in my devices . Un-FREAKIN'-believable.

Posted by Craig at 1:07 AM | Permalink

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I am thinking of updating my ReplayTV's from 400gb (which are pretty darned full) to 750gb drives. Froogle to the rescue - 360 bucks from ewiz.com. Un-freaking believable - these things were just leaked by Seagate back in April, first appeared at $500, and now you can get them for a bargoon price of $360. Soon, free harddrives with every box of Cheerios.

Posted by Craig at 9:55 AM | Permalink

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I don't know what else to say about a 64 GB USB flash drive. Only 18 grams. Oh, and a mere $2,799.95. Cool. I'll take 5.

Posted by Craig at 5:55 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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About 2 months ago, Promise announced a 16 port SATA Raid Controller supporting RAID6, the SuperTrak EX16350. With the inevitability of terabyte and larger drives (750gb now shipping, $499 from NewEgg), RAID6 is a must have in my book. When one of my 400GB drives in my Vtrak 15200 fails, it takes about 24 hours for a rebuild to complete (and the drives are only 75% full). Imagine a mostly full terabyte+ drive - 3 day rebuilds or longer. And in those 3 days, with RAID5, if you lose a drive, your whole array is kaput. So RAID6 and its dual parity drives is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Now stick one of these controllers in a Vtrak, Promise!

Posted by Craig at 6:25 PM | Permalink

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Seagate has leaked (either by accident or an on-purpose accident) the up & coming Seagate 7200.10, which will have a 750GB version (the ST3750640A and ST3750640AS). Sporting a 16mb cache and supporting 3.0Gb/s SATA, these drives would kick some serious ass. 15 of those bad boys in my Vtrak 15200 would give a whopping 9 terabytes of storage in a RAID 50 + hot spare configuration (vs 4.8 terabytes that I have now). Damn!

According to Excaliberpc.com, the ETA for the drive is 5/1/2006, and they are asking $517 per drive. So the 15 drive thing is just a drug-induced hallucination for now. Well, by the time I get my tax return next year, they'll probably be in the $300-$350 range and I could at least fantasize about having them.

Posted by Craig at 6:39 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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Okay, I admit I bought my Buffalo TeraStation without doing enough research. A friend of mine (who I've known for years, lives in Seattle, and shall remain nameless) bought one and loved it, so I did some digging and thought "perfect". The sweet spot for price was the 4x250GB drive configuration, which with RAID 5 would give 750GB of storage - which is perfect for a backup solution. Once you eliminate DVD backups & tv shows from my storage requirements, this was more than enough to back up my DV video, pictures, MP3s, personal files, and software. And at 750 bucks from buy.com, way, way, WAY cheaper than tape solutions.

It is a great little appliance - plug it in, run the software to give it a name, and you are off to the races and able to copy files to it. Oh, don't try to use the backup software they provide - it crashes on startup. Their backup software has a dependancy on .NET Framework, and my guess is that the latest service pack from Microsoft broke it. Why test software before you ship it, that is what customers are for! Anyway, as an appliance, it works great - simple web interface, plug and play (no praying at all), and fast access. I got my stuff backed up in no time (about a week ago or so).

Friday, I was surfing for info on the TeraStartion to show my friend Greg and I noticed that Buffalo had a "professional" version with "easy hot swap". And I said "oh-oh - what about mine?". It didn't even occur to me that someone would build a RAID 5 solution that you couldn't swap a dead drive in, but this got me worried. I didn't care if it was hot swap, I was fine with taking it offline to do a drive replacement. So I took out my handy screwdriver and went to work. After removing over 40 screws, I still had no way to replace the drives. You have to take the thing completely apart to change out a drive, a task that after 45 minutes I still wasn't near accomplishing. So I put it back together, put it back online, and quietly resolved never to buy something that this particular friend owned again unless I did my research. Given that this friend needed me to make his home internet work and to configure Outlook for him, that was probably something I should have figured out without this incident.

Again, the device works great, but it is basically a one-shot device. Once a drive fails, you are living on borrowed time. So when a drive fails (hopefully an event a couple of years out), I'll replace the TeraStation with whatever the 2-year-from-now appliance is. Probably 2-4 terabytes with hot swap for the same price point, if hard drive evolution continues at its current pace.

Posted by Craig at 4:10 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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I should add a new category called "Blog & Lunch" or just "Blunch" to cover this kind of "eat and blog" session. Anyway, last September I blogged about Samsung's announcement of 16gigabit NAND flash memory, and I fantasized about how this paved the way for lower power, lighter weight, faster flash based harddrives. Well, Fast forward 6 months to CeBIT in Germany, and Samsung showed a laptop with a 1.8" 32gb flash harddrive.

Oh, sure, you can grumble about the $30 per GB cost and about how it would cost $960 for this drive, but consider that the 40MB harddrive I bought in 1990 cost me $400 or $10,000 per gigabyte. Or that the 2GB Seagate Barracuda SCSI drive I had in 1996 for taking my work back and forth was around $800. $960 ($771 in 1996 dollars) for a 32gb flash harddrive? Bring it on.

Posted by Craig at 12:32 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I was just sitting here reading Engadget and I thought to myself "hey, has anyone shipped a 160gb laptop drive yet?" I figured someone MUST have, since I just bought a 120gb one last month.

And sure enough, 20 seconds later, I found out I bought a dinosaur. Fujitsu announced these things back in August – I am soooooo out of the loop.

And then, while trying to find out where to buy one, I found out that Seagate announced theirs back in June.The first one will be 5400 rpm Momentus 5400.3 (vs 4200rpm from Fujitsu). And Seagate says they will 7200 rpm versions & versions up to 240gb by 2007. Whoo ha!

They are all taking advantage of perpendicular recording technology. To quote Seagate: a technology that stands data bits on end on the disc platter, rather than flat to the surface as with existing longitudinal recording, to achieve new levels of hard drive data density and storage capacity. Standing bits on end also improves the reliability of read-write performance in demanding environments.

The good news I suppose is that I couldn’t find any to buy as no one is shipping until Q1 2006 it would seem - so I don’t have to feel quite as bad about buying my 120gb drive.

I couldn’t find detailed specs on the Momentus other than basics, but the specs for Fujitsu’s drive are in the extended entry.

Continue reading "160gb 2.5" Drives are a-Comin'" »

Posted by Craig at 8:09 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I went and blinked this summer and missed the fact that 4GB SD cards hit the market in August. Not to be left in the digital dark age, I hurried off to ebay this morning and I found the A-Data 4GB SD card for about $260 bucks. Why was I up at this ungodly time looking on ebay? My boys decided that 4:45am was a good time to get up again. Anyway, $260 was a little steep to upgrade all my SD cards, but I did order one for my Nikon D50. The 2GB SD card I have in the D50 is good for about 550 pictures, which sounds like a lot but I hit the limit last weekend when I took my boys out. It shoots 2.5 FPS, and I like to shoot a lot of images as you never know when the perfect shot is going to occur. The new card should give me about 1100 shots, which seems (at this point, anyway) somewhat reasonable.

Not only is this little badboy 4GB, but it is 150X speed, which translates to about 20megabytes per second of transfer - in theory, I should be able to empty a full card in 3 1/2 minutes.

Posted by Craig at 6:07 AM | Permalink

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I've been lugging around 3 of the 40GB ArchOS mini USB drives for a while now. I typically carry a bunch of ReplayTV shows & some movies, plus leave one mostly free for storing stuff - very handy for when I travel. But what is not handy is the fact that there are 3 of them and trying to remember what is where.

Technology to the rescue. For about the price I paid for one of the 40 gb drives a year ago ($250, but they are $199 MSRP, and about $180 street price now), I bought the Toshiba MK1233GAS 120GB ATA/100 2.5-in 4200RPM Mobile Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer and a little cool USB case, the Vantec NexStar 3 NST-260U2-BK External 2.5in Hard Drive Enclosure (Onyx Black). I always check between NewEgg and ZipZoomFly for the best prices (froogle searches invariably uncover one of those two as the lowest). This time, ZipZoomFly came in at $226 including free 2 day shipping, which beat NewEgg by over 30 bucks, so ZipZoomFly it was.

Together, the whole thing weighs 215 grams, vs 297 grams for the 3 ArchOS drives (and costs $226 vs about $550). So the total savings for this solution is about 25% off the weight and 59% off the price. I love Moore's law!

The case was super easy to use - pull the mounting board out, attach the drive with the 4 included mounting screws, slide it back in, and two screws seal it up. It comes with a cool dual USB to USB mini-B cable. If you have a drive that draws over 500 milliamps (this one draws 700 milliamps), you can plug the cable into a 2nd USB drive to get power. I have it on good authority that I can charge my SP5m phone using this cable and it will charge way faster, but I haven’t been brave enough to try that yet.

The only trick to getting the thing going is that it is unformatted, so you have to go into Administrative tools in the control panel, click into Computer Management then into Disk Management, and format the drive. Intuitive, yes?

Posted by Craig at 6:28 AM | Permalink

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I got a new 1G SanDisk miniSD late last week - for 77 bucks from Amazon! It has turned my new SP5m into a combination GPS navigator and ipod shuffle. More on that later - but man oh man, 77 bucks for a 1GB miniSD - soon, they will be paying ME to take the memory off their hands.

Posted by Craig at 11:22 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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Samsung has 16-gigabit NAND technology that will enter production 2nd half of 2006. Whoo hoo! Not only will this give us bad-ass new compact flash and SD cards (assuming you don't have a brain dead camera like my Nikon D1X that uses fat16 and can only see 2GB), but it paves the way for flash based harddrives. In the next couple of years we should see laptops with flash based drives, which will read & write faster, weigh less, and use less power. Sweeeeet!

Posted by Craig at 7:29 AM | Permalink

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Posted by Craig at 2:21 PM | Permalink

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Posted by Craig at 7:07 AM | Permalink

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Update on October 30th, 2005:
The drive is now $128.90. Price per gigabyte $0.403.

Update on April 21st, 2006:
The drive is now $116.90. Price per gigabyte $0.365.

Update on May 20th, 2007:
The drive is now $98.90. Price per gigabyte $0.301.

Posted by Craig at 9:36 PM | Permalink

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