http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp … Order=BESTMATCH

I bought 8 3TB drives a couple of months ago for my home file server and they were a little bit more expensive than the prices you see listed there.

Yea the 3TB command a little premium. But boy, 24TB 😳

WOW

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

You can get a 24x DVD-RW for like AUD 25.

DVDs really aren't useful anymore in this era of drives that store hundreds of gigabytes.

I am sort of tempted to copy all the stuff I backed up onto DVD-Rs long ago back onto one of my hard drives, just because it's so inaccessible as it is now.

Totally. These days I use the DVD burner mostly to burn things like the Ultimate Boot CD, Puppy Linux, FreeDOS and so on.

Considering my retro PCs all use modern DVD burners as well, I might be better off just getting CD-RW media though...

or buy one of these http://www.amazon.com/VE200-B-Virtual-Enclosu … 11174813&sr=8-2

If your BIOS works with it no more CDs ever again!

DosFreak wrote:

or buy one of these http://www.amazon.com/VE200-B-Virtual-Enclosu … 11174813&sr=8-2

If your BIOS works with it no more CDs ever again!

That's pretty slick!

Surprised this is from Zalman though. You would think that one of the storage companies would come up with something like this 🤣

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Totally. These days I use the DVD burner mostly to burn things like the Ultimate Boot CD, Puppy Linux, FreeDOS and so on.

Same. Ever since USB flash storage has become affordable I barely ever burn optical media. Actually, I don't even have a burner in my new Quad core rig, only some old IDE DVD reader.
If I burn CD's or DVD's, it's usually for nlited XP's and such (and occasionally an audio CD so I can kinda get rid of my stock of old 12x CDR's 😜)

I never really liked optical media as backups as it's rather inconvenient once you start accumulating many disks. Also you can't update a disk. I'd rather use an external harddrive as a backup.

Yea the discs haven't kept up with the storage growth / requirements. Bluray is still way to expensive. In terms of drives and media.

USB have gotten cheap as well. Only area where I don't see much movement are SSD. I keep looking but prices seem to stay high. And the affordable drives are just way to small. There are also reliability issues it seems.

PS: They didn't have the WD in stock, so I got two Samsungs. Only 83 bucks...

Heh,. Makes me remember the old times.

In 2004, I implemented a large Oracle database on a client. The database was deployed on RAC-clustered servers and SAN (Storage Area Network) hard drives. The SAN came in two rack-mounted enclosures, with twelve hard drives each.

Each hard drive was 36 GB, which was considered large at that time. Thus, the SAN's raw capacity was 864 Gigabytes. Since it the database was OLTP, I told the system engineer to deploy RAID 10 configuration, cutting the usable capacity into 432 Gigabytes.

Yes,. less than half Terabytes. And it took two rack-mounted enclosures --each housing 12 hard drives-- to achieve such "large" capacity.

Noiw, I'm holding one Terabyte in my hand; a 2.5" external hard drive...

It's kinda ridiculous. Getting a huge ass HDD and copying everything from DVDs on that is quite tempting, but if the HDD dies for whatever reason, you lose all the data 🙁

If the data is precious then you should really build something like a Raid 1 or 5 array.

Most of the stuff I store isn't important. Just Steam games and TV shows.

The importants stuff is quite compact. I have a scheduled backup setup, but using Live Mesh gets synced amonst my desktop, notebook and netbook and onto the cloud (SkyDrive).

So tempted:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/21/1 … ge-Pod-For-7384

DosFreak wrote:

or buy one of these http://www.amazon.com/VE200-B-Virtual-Enclosu … 11174813&sr=8-2

If your BIOS works with it no more CDs ever again!

That looks like it's just a bare enclosure with no drive inside.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

If the data is precious then you should really build something like a Raid 0 or 5 array.

Agree with RAID 5, disagree with RAID 0. RAID 0 doesn't offer data protection whatsoever, it only makes data drive access faster by splitting the data evenly into multiple disks; the more disk you have, the faster you access the data.

RAID 5 protects your data, but it has slow writing performance, since you need to rebuild the parity everytime you change the data. But it has the cost advantage, since the parity only takes 1/n of your capacity, while n is the number of your hard drive.

RAID 5 is suitable for "mostly read-only" databases like Business Intelligence.

RAID 1 is mirror of two hard drives. It doesn't have speed penalty, but it is costly since you always lost half of your capacity.

Since I was building an OLTP system, then I had to go with RAID 10, which is a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1. Let say you have eight hard drives, then you make two RAID 0 volumes, each consists four hard drive. Then you mirror the two RAID 0 volumes, making it RAID 0+1.

Yea I stuffed up. Meant the mirrored raid of course 🤣

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea I stuffed up. Meant the mirrored raid of course 🤣

😁

I remember those old days.. I've been very meticulous when designing storage configuration. When the storage comes with many hard drives, I usually create separate RAID volume for index files, separate RAID volume for redologs (rollback segments), separate RAID volume for log files, separate RAID volume for reference tables, separate RAID volume for transaction tables.... etcetera. Just because I want to make sure that everything runs on different hard drive spindles to maximize performance.

And the systems engineer said I'm an obsessive-compulsive database admin.

Those days are over now. SAN vendors keep claiming that hard drives are getting faster and faster that different spindles don't matter anymore. These days, SAN vendors like NetApp and Fujitsu are putting more emphasis on automation and easy to use than control. When you create RAID volume, it is now virtual volume, and you cannot specify which physical hard drives belong to which volume anymore.

Guess it doesn't work well for control freaks like me, but that's just the way it is, I think. At first, it was hard for me to accept the fact that I cannot put different database files on different spindle. But well, time changes.

And things get even "worse" with the arrival of virtual machines.... You know, VMWare and such. Database servers no longer have separate physical volumes for storing various data files, since even the hard disks are VMDK files.

Fascinating.

For the home environment / home server I really like Raid 5. I admit I haven't built one yet, my only experience with Raid was Raid 0 with two 250GB HDDs on an AMD S 939 board.

But in terms of features and compromises I think Raid 5 is a good pick.

If you want an interesting read about the future of storage check this out 3D video: http://www.ulillillia.us/other/True3DMonitorDesign.shtml

With a data rate of 382,205,952,000 bytes per second for film (based on 24 frames per second), today's 3 terabyte (3-trillion-byte) hard drives can only store 7.85 seconds of uncompressed 1920x1080x1920 volumetric video (or "volideo" if you will). Fortunately, since a huge chunk of each frame is fully transparent, the very simple RLE compression algorithm could easily achieve 96% compression for almost any scene. This 25:1 compression ratio means that that same 3 TB hard drive can store 196.22 seconds of volideo, about 2 1/4 minutes. That's still much too short to store a feature length film of 120 minutes.

This is where lossy compression algorithms come in, much like MPEG-2 for video and JPEG for photos. Much of the same algorithms that work in MPEG-2 to compress video well can also work with volideo, though the algorithm has to be changed so that transparent parts are also included. It wouldn't be unusual to achieve a 500:1 or even 3000:1 compression ratio for a decent quality this way, allowing feature length volideos of the 1920x1080x1920 size to easily fit on a 3 TB hard drive. By 2025, however, 3 PB (petabyte, 3000 trillion bytes) hard drives might be available, allowing the storage of a few thousand such volideos to be possible. The 25 GB blu-ray disks will likely be 25 TB optical disks by then (or even data cubes), enough so that a 120-minute 110:1-compressed volideo can easily fit on it.

Be warned though - ulillillia has extreme OCD so your eyes may glaze over reading his tie 🤣