Just saw this 1.5 TB Seagate drive on Newegg, and it only costs $189. That’s crazy. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337. Meanwhile 1 TB drives can be had for @ $120.
The problem of backing up data rears its head, as you’d need at least a couple of these drives if you care anything at all about the data on them.
Backup is primarily what I’d want these kinds of drives for, right now. Slap one in an enclosure, and it could hold full copies of my PCs, laptop, and PS3. And then one more for an offsite copy, swapped with the first every once in a while.
More space for the HTPC would be nice too, and I occasionally toy with the idea of slapping a bunch of them into a case like this. Until I actually price it out…
That’s why I bought a Drobo. I have 4 drives in there now, so there’s 2 TB of storage with full redundancy. It’s the easiest system I’ve ever used. I’m backing up my Mac via Time Machine to the Drobo, which writes 2 copies of the data to different drives.
$113CAD locally for 1tb Seagate drives.
I just upgrade from 40GB (for my system drive) which I don’t know how I ever managed with to 1TB. It’s so awesome.
The DROBO is more for pure storage/backup, as compared to the HP Mediaserver which I could use to share mp3s and videos to my consoles, right?
I’ve started taking high-res Fraps of my WoW raids, and I’m very rapidly running out of space for the raw files. It would be nice to have something expandable - right now I’m using a 750gig WD MyBook
Actually the Drobo is for whatever you want. It supports firewire and you can be using it while backing up to it. If you get their network share thingy (DroboShare) it can be a network drive as well.
It’s more expensive than other options but that extra money is going into the user friendliness of it. Seriously, I opened the box, plugged in some hard drives, turned it on and started using it. It was really nice.
Apparently people are having trouble with the 1.5TB Seagate drives, so you might want to hold off on them for now.
Bah, I’d only need about 800GB for full backups of all of my systems, but I’d like room to grow without having to go to multiple drives, too.
I’ve seen the freezing reports, but I haven’t run into them.
However, I bought two of these things for my new rig, and one of them died after a few days. The replacement is running fine for now, but I’m feeling… insecure. The drives had a “made in Thailand” sticker on them, and the supposition is that the new Seagate factory doesn’t have its bugs worked out yet.
I’m running one of these as my secondary drive, but do have my documents and pictures folder on it.
I had similar freezes initially, but they went away as Vista continued to do its optimization magic. I’m keeping an eye on it, though.
I was looking keenly at the HP media server runs windows home server a couple of months ago.
It does not run RAID - it has another method of redundancy - it tries to keep file copies along more than one drive.
With an Xbox360/media center extender it apparently will serve up music and video. I’m not sure what it will support - my plan was going to be running TVersity to serve to my PS3 (I don’t have an xbox). AFAIK it will run under Windows home server.
It’s a very fast machine, if your raw files are large. Smallnetbuilder quotes 67 MB/sec writes for a single drive in gigabit ethernet.
My own tests show copying from one Samsung fireball (333gb platters, high density) to another are around 44 MB/sec so it’s darn fast. I’m just bitter cause my cheap synology gives me 9 MB / sec.
Apparently the droboshare is pretty expensive ($700 for drobo + share) and it lacks upnp/dlna capability so you can’t feed media to your tv. According to the benchmarks I can dig up, it looks as slow as my Synology cs407e. (6-8 MB/sec)
Looks very slick and easy thought. Check how much speed you need. I found 5 MB/sec was too slow for acronis to backup to (it would fail after 20 hours with bad media quality). After replacing all my cables / switches I went up to 9 MB/sec and acronis hasn’t complained yet.
I use an HP media server & it’s wonderful. I can copy Xvid & Divx movies to it and stream them to my 360 without problems. Very easy to set up.
It can also host an iTunes share, although I haven’t tried that.
It’s always fun to calculate what storage actually means when we take another step up in density…
1 text page (uncompressed) ~ 4 KB, and so a book with 250 pages ~ 1 MB; so 1 TB lets you store a mere 1 million books. You’d need 5 TB to store a big university library in text, or well, you could always compress. If you read a book every day for 70 years, that’s only 25,560 books.
MP3 track ~ 1 MB/minute. So that’s 1 million minutes of music on 1 TB. That’s almost 2 years. If you listen to music for 4 hours a day, you could go more like 12 years without hearing the same track twice. Of course finding 1 million minutes of music that’s actually worthwhile is left as an exercise to the reader.
Blu-ray ~ 6 GB/hour. How lame, 1 TB stores just 166 hours of high def video. If you want to video-log your every waking hour in high def for 70 years, I guess you’ll need something like 2.5 PB.