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320 Gig HD in 1U Of Rack Space 124

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-the-do-it-yourself-mega-tivo dept.
Mn3m0nic writes "Maxtor today announced a 320 gig rack mounted network storage server that fits in 1U (1.75") of rack space or 1 terrabyte in 5.25"." 14 bucks a gig. Can you stream video over a 100Mbs ether comfortably? Perhaps this is the backend for your DeCSS based DVD Jukebox? Or the mega Tivo extra hard drive (I s'pose that'd take some work tho). But you could fit a hundred or so movies on there... we're just inching towards it now.
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320 Gig HD in 1U Of Rack Space More

320 Gig HD in 1U Of Rack Space

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  • It provides RAID 1, but not necessarily 320 GB when using RAID 1. I think they're quoting the raw capacity.
  • This is much better!!! http://www.emc.com/products/systems/symmetrix.jsp

    Yep, sure is... if you need that much storage. However, neither Symmetrix or CLARiiON come in a convenient 1U (or even 2U or 4U) rack mountable form. If you're a small ISP with limited rack space, the Maxtor option would be a much better solution (as would the VA storage options, but they're very pricy, and not particularly dense, storage wise).

  • The question you should all be asking. (Score:3)

    by TrevorB ( 57780 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @04:14AM (#769132) Homepage
    As a sysadmin, the real question you should be asking:

    "How the F**K do I back this thing up?!?!?!"

    Sure it fits into a tiny rack mount, but the 25 tape DLT with robotic arm changer will take up the rest of the room!!! (OK, they have these things down to the size of a small refrigerator, but you get my point...)
  • Then exabyte, i think.
  • Last time I checked, SlashDot was not beholden to you or anyone else insofar as what gets posted as news items. The whim of Taco is enough to determine what we see and what we don't. And just as you have the right to bitch about it, you don't see everyone else clamoring to try and force you to make a worthy post (which you havn't).

    If you don't like reading these news articles, STOP READING SLASHDOT you MORON! No one is MAKING you stay here and frankly the entire /. community would be better off if you LEFT! So pack your sand filled pussy up and GET THE HELL OUT!

    P.S.: I appologize for not using the word "fuck" more in my posts. All praise to Lewis Black.


    Bad Mojo [rps.net]
  • 320 on the face of it looks like a big number... but i've got 45 in my own pc now.

    Our flat (appartment) network already has a server with 4 20 gig maxtor disks and we've got 4 more 60 gigs on order.

    That will give us about the same amount total diskspace although we intend to raid5 it and bring our total storage down to 0.25Tb (including the 10gig boot disk)
  • Here's a TiVo question, which is hopefully not considered off-topic, as the word "Tivo" was mentioned in the Slashdot post ;).

    Anyhow, does anyone know of any Tivo-like appliances coming out that will store more than 2 hours of TV? Oftentimes, I record a whole week's worth of TV and then just watch it when I have time (on the weekends). So, 2 hours isn't nearly enough, but 6-8 hours would be much better.

    On an unrelated note, I'm considering getting a D-VHS VCR. Does anyone have any recommendations for this, as far as where to buy one, or which brands to consider?

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • unfortunately, HD manufacturers want to impress us with how big their drives are, so it's really 1000 bytes/kilobyte for them, and so on. It didn't make much of a difference back when 1Gb was huge for a HD, but on the terabyte scale, those dropped bytes add up ...
  • Oh, I don't know. How about, maybe, a professional tape backup solution, instead of the 40/80 tape drive that comes in your Dell?
    The 430 occupies just two cubic feet and five units of rack space. Drawing on M2's industry-leading combination of capacity, performance and compact size, the 430 tape library offers users the highest rack density, minimizing the use of costly data center space and reducing the overall cost of ownership. The Exabyte 430 accommodates up to four M2 tape drives and 30 data cartridges, delivering up to 1.8 TB (4.5 TB compressed*) of capacity and 173 GB/hour (432 GB/hour compressed) of data throughput.
    All you need is an intern to swap out the tapes every morning.

  • I belive that after tera comes petabyte

    Ahh, yes. The vegetarian byte!

    Hmmm... Maybe I should have quit when I was ahead.

  • Gawd, that really pisses me off. Why do site designers think it's such a wonderfull idea to irritate the hell out of their users?
  • hard cards & older stuff.

    Some of us are just amazed @ how fast & how far this stuff is going.

    If you don't care, don't read.
  • I stream full quality mpeg dvd rips (ooops, is that legal?) over 10baseT at home. Man I love my Creative Labs dxr3 mpeg decoder card, plays mpegs on my TV at perfect quality.

    ** Martin
  • Yeah, I wasn't quite sure. Oh well, at least one good thing came out of my not-such-a-good-idea-in-hindsight post: I now know the proper names for 2^50, 2^60, 2^70, and 2^80 bytes. More useless trivia, Woo-Hoo.

  • TiVo can record up to 30 hours.
  • If rackspace can cost $1000/U/month, then don't ya think it would be a good idea to find a better site for the boxen ? Heck, if that's what rackspace is going for these days, I'm converting my apartment into a colo facility =)
  • If you get a D-VHS VCR, it will be obsolete in 2006.
    • The government will take back all analog TV frequencies in 2006.
    • D-VHS VCRs can't record digital TV because digital TV has digital rights management [slashdot.org] that "effectively controls access" to TV programming according to 17 USC 1201 [cornell.edu] (commonly known as the DMCA).
    Best to get an S-VHS or Hi8 VCR (records at nearly broadcast quality) and use the converter box that the government will be handing out to analog TV users in 2006.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • No, those numbers are off (Score:3)

    by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @04:59AM (#769147) Journal

    The 5.25" unit is a wonderful breakthrough, as we no longer need to use 8" winchesters on these desktop microcomputers. However, the OS just isn't up to it.

    For a mere $5,000, the revolutionary corvus 5mb drive stores an amazing five *mega*bytes (thats 5,120 K) on your desktop. Unfortunately, dos 3.3 is quite insistant that disks are 143k, so this appears to your Apple as 35 separate disks on the same controller. There are rumors that the upcoming ProDOS will be able to use a disk this size, but this is rank speculation. Other rumors suggest that a revision to the new IBM PC will allow it to use similar units.

    With such technology already here, we can only wonder what 1983 will bring. For now, though, we can certainly use this price effective--only $1/kbyte--mass storage.

    :)
  • I also usually run with Java and Javascript off ...

    Possibly offtopic, but has anyone else noticed that when you turn off Javascript in Netscape and even if you leave stylesheets 'enabled', stylesheets still don't work? .. is that a subtlety of Javascript that I missed or is it a bug in Netscape?

    I'd like to run without Java and Javascript enabled too as I agree they suck ass, but as they screw up stylesheets I'm a bit reluctant to turn them off.. anyone have any suggestions?

    --
  • yea, but it sounds like something he'ld say...so f' it the guys a moron....

    "sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."

  • Home arrays (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hmph. 320Gb for $4k? Not such a good deal. The new Maxtor 80Gb drives (albeit slow) are price pointed at $310 (current 3rd lowest price at http://www.pricewatch.com)

    So: 1 Promise Ultra UDMA100 IDE Controller and (4) 80Gb Maxtor Drives

    $1,350 if you can't find a good deal on the controller. Let the card do the Raid-5 work for you, and you have a 240Gb Raid-5 array at home for under $1,500.00

    Use a data-center friendly OS and you can put *two* of the controllers and 8 of the drives in one server and have 560Gb. Heck, you could toss all of that into your average large ATX case, just don't forget to add some cooling fans.

    (Note: yes, I have this setup at home, I'm only using the 40Gb drives though. 120Gb raid-5, streaming MP3, video and backing up the other machines in my house - bought the parts ad hoc for well under $600)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Hey follow technoids, can we use consistent units please? Normally Gb means "gigabit" and GB means "gigabyte". I didn't make it up, but it is a helpful distinction when abbreviating.
  • If rackspace can cost $1000/U/month, then don't ya think it would be a good idea to find a better site for the boxen ?
    Multiple OC-12s are rather expensave arn't they :-) Seriously that figure is 3 to 4 years old, and for a high bandwidth location with forced air cooling and 3 day battery backup. I don't know what current figues are, I would expect them to be much lower in many places.

    My original point was merely that some places are really really expensave, and paying an extra $3500 to save 2U of rack space has a payback time mesured in months (two in this case).

    FWIW, yesterday I got a quote from Firstworld for colo service. They're opening a new facility here in Houston, down the street from the Level-3 guys.

    Anyway, they want about a grand a month for a 42-U rack with a 12-month contract. Plus bandwidth. (They're charging about the going rate for bandwidth. Of course, you don't have to pay for the local loop, so you can realize a bunch of savings there.) 14- and 21-U racks are also available from them for about 1/3 and 1/2 as much.

    Telco colo space is a lot more expensive. I've heard tales of guys paying $100K just to apply for a few units worth of rack space in a SWBell facility.

    As for getting in to the business of being a colo provider, well, it's good work if you can swing it. The racks themselves (actually, they use cabinets with locks on them) are fairly inexpensive. However, in addition to the bandwidth requirements (which, on a bit-per-bit basis, don't cost near as much as you might think) you've got to provide power and air conditioning as well as physical site security. You also have to have a fairly substantial building as the key to success in that business is to get lots of customers to each buy their little slice of bandwidth. In CA, you've got to be earthquake resistant, here on the coast, you've got to be hurricane resistant. It takes some money to get started.

  • You could if it was SCSI.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • decaym wrote:
    Fibre Channel is good if you need some of the features like several servers sharing one array or joined arrays in differnet buildings. Otherwise, you can match it for performance and far beat it for cost using old fashioned SCSI.

    You know, SCSI can be used to share a disk array among multiple computers. You just have to set the device ID of the interface in all but one of the computers to something other than the default. However, I wasn't aware that the FC tax was that high compared to the SCSI tax.

    decaym also wrote:

    I fear that if we don't see some major good developments in the Fibre Channel arena soon, it could end up going the way of ATM.

    ATM is not all that unpopular. It's the technology of choice for 0-CIR WAN services with a peak data rate greater than 1.5Mbps. I don't think that fibre channel is all that unpopular, either. In the latest issue of RTC magazine, they talk about using fibre channel for general interfacing to embedded systems because of its low cost, compared to other embedded interfacing methods, and high performance. I think I lean toward agreeing with the opinion I read in SysAdmin, which was that SANs are not yet very important to computing, but they're going to be.

    On the other hand, the device in question is designed to fill a different need than that filled by a SAN.

  • Uncompressed HDTV is about 1.5 gigabit/sec. Compressed (MPEG-2) HDTV is about 19 megabit/sec.
  • One terabyte, for your information, is *not* 1024 gigabyte. If you had taken a look at the definitions of the prefixes in the systeme international, you would have known that tera is the prefix for 10^12, not for
    2^40, as you seem to imply here. The systeme international actually *does* have prefixes for binary powers. 2^40 bytes would be a tebibyte, using those prefixes.
  • The *only* place where 'storage' is measured constantly in powers of two is on-chip memory.

    You mean you've never seen a 65Mb RAM machine advertized?

    Roger.
  • Gee, maybe its because electronics are based in binary? Binary is just as valid for unit measure as base 10 and in computing is much simpler. Don't speak if you have no idea about what you are talking about
  • Check out Sony's 200 disk changer. [sony.com]

    Not usable as a media server, but definately awesome as a jukebox. I've seen a 400 disk changer also being advertised in the market.

  • I do agree that being a colo provider entails a bunch of steep costs for the facilities, but despite all those doodads I personally can't justify charging such astronomical fees for less than a cubic-foot of space. Some of these facilities house thousands of boxen. Can it cost them over a million per month in hydro + bandwidth + security + staff + investment amortization + rent/lease fees + profit margin + whatever ? IANACFCEO (i am not a colo facility C.E.O.) but it all seems grossly overpriced for something that can be broken down, simplified and just humanized.

    Maybe I'm absolutely ignorant for what I'm about to say, but I would think that instead of focusing on 150% reliability and efficiency, why not just stick to good old common sense. If you want good coverage, then spread out the boxen all around the continent. Don't go paying through the nose just to be housed next to a major NAP. So what if the average ping there is 20% less than at your previous location ? You're not remote-controlling nuke missiles here, you're serving web pages, databases, maybe game servers.. you're service to PEOPLE. People are relatively slow and forgiving. We probably won't notice that ping discrepancy if it's still under 100ms. And if you were to be unlucky and catch an hour or two of downtime, will the users run down and beat you up ? Hell no, they will wait until it's fixed, as long as it's done in a reasonable time frame. Quit trying to develop the absolutely perfect network and try to settle for "just perfect enough". Again, we're only human.
  • Which means that compressed (MPEG-4) HDTV will be about 1.8 megabit/sec. And HDTV compressed using MPEG-7 will be (I'm guessing now) around 800 Kbps.

    Getting better? See my point? ok bye.

    Axel

  • Expensive. (Score:3)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @03:53AM (#769164) Homepage Journal
    I could build a 3U Linux or BSD machine with a couple Promise IDE cards in it and 4 80 gig IDE drives for about $1200 or so. Maxtor wants $4500!

    Hmm, what will *I* use for *my* mp3 server?

    Also, that page is one of those God-forsaken meta-refresh-is-zero-seconds pages. Sites that keep pulling you back suck ass.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Isn't 1 mole = 6.82 * 10^23? If that's true, a yottabyte is on about the same order of magnitude as 1 mole of bytes isn't it. So even if you use single atoms to store the bits, you'd need 8 times that much (still about the same order of magnitute though) to store that many bytes. There's no way you're going to fit that (and the equipment necessary to read it) into a space less than (or probably even equal to) a standard 5.25" bay. Of course I suppose there's the possibility of technology unfathomable today... like storing multiple bytes in single quanta of energy or subatomic particles in multiple dimensions or something. But if that's even possible, it's gotta be a *long* ways off.
  • Yes, a 10/100 network is has plenty of bandwidth to transmit DeCSS-ed tracks. I've done it before, and just to make sure I wasn't dreaming, I did it again just now with a track of Top Gun. Anyone who asks "why?" wouldn't understand the answer, but I'll give it a shot. I would love to be able to have all my DVDs ripped onto a central server so I could watch it from a networked TIVO-like device in any room in the house, without having to risk scratching the original disc. A couple more years, a better TIVO, cheaper hard drives, and life will be perfect. :-) Anyone who already has their MP3s available on every box in the house should have no trouble seeing the appeal of doing the same with movies. Long live Moore's Law!

  • That quote about "If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure" is NOT Al Gore. It's instead the incredibly bright Dan Quayle. Al Gore may be many things (such as boring), but he is not stupid. Or at least not quite that stupid. That would be Dan Quayle.

    For another Dan Quaylism, try this: "I want to be Robin to George Bush's Batman". Heh.... also, while at a Latin America Conference Quayle commented that "I am sorry that I am unable to speak to you in your native language of Latin, as I dropped it after entering law school". I have 5 pages of Quaylisms, and trust me that quote you have is Quayle, NOT Gore.

  • OK, I'll bite:

    A bit is a zero or a one
    A byte is 8 bits
    A kilobyte is 1024 bytes
    A Megabyte is 1024 kilobytes
    A Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes
    A Terrabyte is 1024 Gigabytes

    (I apolgize if I didn't get the capitalization or spelling correct. Anyone know what comes after Terrabyte?)

  • Consider that USENET has been around something like twenty years. Currently, a full non-binary feed is running something around 2GB/day.

    If you take an extremely conservative straight-line growth approximation, then this would be something like 7.3TB of disk storage over that period of time, or more than 23 of these devices.

    However, a full binary feed today is running something like 130GB/day. A straight line growth approximation for that would be about 465TB, or about 1500 of these devices.

    Of course, the real growth is exponential and not straight-line, so while the disk space required to store all the historical articles would be much smaller, the space required to be able to store another X years worth of articles would be far, far larger, and I'm sure would more than compensate for the difference.
    --
    Brad Knowles

  • That's why I looked at earlier models. But the not-quite-NFS and not-quite-NTFS system was the showstopper. For 4 Grand, I can put together a cold-swappable RAID with true NFS or true NTFS, and still stay at least close to the price-point, adding only an hour or so of my time. And the result is both standards-based and user-maintainable. In fact, I'm using a 120GB RAID built in just such a fashion as "instant backup" to supplement my tape backup (we originally had other plans for the RAID, but they fell through, and so I put the box to use. . .)
  • Wow. I explian that, in real life, storage capacities of hard disks and communication are usually termed in powers of ten, and that memory is in powers of two, and you sort of... flip out on me? No SHIT it's binary.

    I have a VERY good idea of what I'm talking about.

  • Doh! (Score:5)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <petedaly@ix[ ]tcom.com ['.ne' in gap]> on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @03:55AM (#769172)
    We just bought 1 160gig, and 4 240 gigs! Shoulda waited another month. Anyway, here is my 60 second review.

    They work great for storing this that don't require harddrive access speed, such as images (in my case...and no, not pr0n), or mp3's. They have a 10/100baseT connection to the network, and can share using nfs, or smb.

    Bad: No Raid-5. This means your are forced to have at the least 2 volumes, at the most 4. One large volume would be nice. Also, you can't do both nfs and smb on the same share..either one or the other.

    On the other hand...these things run freebsd and are hackable (in the good meaning of the term.) When I couldn't get the admin java applet to load on my system (my browser is hosed) I was able to telnet into the sucker and change the IP using vi to edit the text files on the system. I am sure with a little work, these things could be made into some interesting devices. I was thinking Apache/PHP in my case. Would make a hell of a web server for my low usage/high storage situation.

    For the situations I mentioned they are good for, I highly recomend them. The price per meg can't be beat, but I question how good they would be for a general purpose envirnment where users would access them directly. The freebsd w/ telnet access is a plus.

    -Pete
  • The company I work for has a product that can handle 28TB of Network Attached Storage...
    --
    The world is divided in two categories:
    those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.

  • Heheh. Did you notice the "link" to Maxtor at the bottom of the page? Apparently putting the text of a url in blue with an underline isn't the way to make an actual hyperlink... whodathunkit? LOL!

    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • Would be nice instead of some network file system, if they'd just give me the storage with a fibre channel interface.

    Again, these are probally IDE drives inside, cause Maxtor doesn't make SCSI disks (anymore).

    But then again, I don't care cause I built a 160GB thing just like this of RAID5 storage with an FC interface.

  • Re:Expensive. (Score:3)

    by stripes ( 3681 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @04:20AM (#769176) Homepage Journal
    I could build a 3U Linux or BSD machine with a couple Promise IDE cards in it and 4 80 gig IDE drives for about $1200 or so. Maxtor wants $4500!

    Yep. It is cheper because doing it yourself is almost allways cheaper. Plus it is chepaer because it is three times the size. Sometimes that is a great tradeoff. Other times rack space is expensave (sometimes MORE then $1000/U/month). Frequently expensave enough to make a 1U vs. 3U diffrence worth many $1000s in a single year. Sometimes in just a month. Try pricing telco colos someday.

    Of corse there are lots of places where rack space is dirt cheap, and using 3U vs. 1U to save a little money is a no-brainer.

    The big problem is space tends to be an inelastic commodity. Run out of disk space? Buy more! Run out of space space? Oops, it takes months to set up a new lease and get it connected and... In fact just evecting people from their office/cubes so we can grow the machine room takes time...

    So space starts out cheap, and gets incresingly costly as you consume it. Sometimes you have to go back and replace the 3U disk boxes with 1U disk boxes, and the 3U SPARCs with 1U SPARCs, and sell off the old ones (if they retain any value). At least the new stuff costs way less then it would have when you first did the build-out...

  • Ummm you get a second one...?
  • Divx with Mp3 audio compression comes out to around 120 Kbps max. Not only will that stream over 100bT Ethernet, it will stream across the Internet and down any DSL connection. My 650 MHz coppermine can encode an analog signal into Divx at 640x480 realtime. Not only is this great for movie delivery, but Internet video conferencing just went high-definition.

    One thing that I think is worth pointing out: bandwidth was, for a very long time, the limiting factor to Internet technologies. Now that high-tech compression schemes like Mpeg 4 (and soon Mpeg 7) are here, the limiting factor may be shifting to CPU power. We'll be able to squeeze HDTV into a 56K line, assuming you have the CPU muscle to decode the stream. ok bye.

    Axel

  • Tapes are portable. We can backup our system twice, on two tapes,.. keep one, and send one to an off-site location. With this system we could eliminate one tape,... but not the other.

  • Disk space in the IDE Arena is now well under $10 a gigabyte (I think it was around $7 last I checked.) SCSI's are still significantly more expensive.

    That's why I'm using IDE for my lousy MP3 server and SCSI (RAID, probably) for my important machine that I need/want to be fast. It doesn't need as much storage space, but I want whatever space it does have to be disgustingly fast (and I don't want to do it in software, barf.)

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • When I used to intern at an ISP I remember the disk pack we/they had to use for the news host. Something like 20 1gb Fujitsu HD's. The thing had it's own UPS, weighed in around 300 pounds and was as noisy as freight train. Something like this Maxtor devise would have been a godsend. The power draw alone is enough to justify the cost.

  • Re:blah (Score:1)

    by aphr0 ( 7423 )
    I've wondered that myself for quite some time. The only reason I can think of is to trap users in the site, so they'll spend more time, click on more ads, buy more things, etc. Which, of course, would cause a backlash from hell if anything like this was tried in a brick and mortar store. For some reason, people will accept most anything trampling over them if it deals with computers. Reliability, rights, safety. The public needs to be more demanding of their rights an expectations when it comes to technology.
  • for those wondering about prefixes:

    1 kilobyte = 2^10 Bytes = 1024 bytes
    1 Megabyte = 2^20 Bytes = 1024 kilobytes
    1 gigabyte = 2^30 Bytes = 1024 Megabytes
    1 terabyte = 2^40 Bytes = 1024 gigabytes
    1 petabyte = 2^50 Bytes = 1024 terabytes
    1 Exabyte = 2^60 Bytes = 1024 petabytes
    1 Zettabyte = 2^70 Bytes = 1024 Exabytes
    1 Yottabyte = 2^80 Bytes = 1024 Zettabytes

    Gee... I wonder how long I have to wait $14 a zettabyte?

    -dean
    -----------------------
  • You can't boot off it with PC hardware because of the 1024 cylinder limit. Most OSes won't be able to use the entire thing as one partition (not that geeks would WANT to, but....). And, the age-old complaint: "I'll never be able to fill the whole thing!"

    God bless hard drive technology. :)

    -Chris
  • My company has been doing a lot of research on drive storage solutions and we've looked at what Maxtor has to offer. We've considered rolling our own solution by purchasing the new 80G Maxtor drives and plunking them into a rack mountable server [tdl.com] case, which is about 2x as tall as Maxtor's solution.

    It would be around $1800 for (6) 80G drives, $450 for the rack and then another $550 for memory, motherboard, extra controller and processor. The total amount would be about $2800 for 480G of unRAIDed drive storage or 320G of RAIDed storage. That works out to either $5.83 a Gig for unRAIDed or $8.75 a Gig for RAIDed.

    That's less than 2/3 the cost of Maxtor's solution and you can run your choice of OS and network file system.

    Kord Campbell
    http://www.grub.org
  • Unless it runs off EIDE, it's not for Tivo. Nothing in the press release seemed to mention the interface (are all "network stack" hard drives SCSI?)

  • Allow me to break our `bc' and calculate those exponents:

    1 kilobyte =1024 bytes
    1 kilobytes=1048576 bytes
    1 gigabyte =1073741824 bytes
    1 terabyte =1099511627776 bytes
    1 petabyte =1125899906842624 bytes
    1 Exabyte =1152921504606846976 bytes
    1 Zettabyte=1180591620717411303424 bytes
    1 Yottabyte=1208925819614629174706176 bytes

    And BTW, 2^300 is the first time when 1 [whatever]byte will be 2*10^[something or other] bytes, so things will be really misleading then if you still think in bytes.

  • Why is it that have to try and relate every piece of new hardware to gaming, MP3s, or DVDs? Some people do real work, you know.

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.


  • And I guesse they include the reserved sectors for when bad sectors show up too. Or is that just for single drives, and not important for RAID?

  • I should have qualified my statement about ATM to say "ATM in the LAN". Most people I've talked to trying to use ATM in a building have been very unhappy and wanted nothing more than to rip it out and go to a combination of 1Gb and 100Mb Ethernet.

    If you want to see how expensive FC equipment can be. Go to Dell's website and look at some of their "PowerVault" 630F and 650F storage equipment. This is all FC based, and can give you a good idea of how expensive a good array costs.

  • 2^(some whole number) will never equal (some other whole number)*10^(yet another whole number). In case you haven't noticed, the least significant digit never hit's 0. It goes trough they cycle 2 4 8 6 2 4 8 6 ...

    btw, 2^300 is 2.037+*10^90. I won't post the full number as it's easy to get in python (2L**300).

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • Sounds like it could be one of the BSDs with Samba and an admin front-end. Don't know of anyone else with an implemented soft updates in the works. They could've implemented it themselves within some other system but something tells me they didn't.

  • blah (Score:1)

    by aphr0 ( 7423 )
    Careful, it's one of those urls-of-DOOM that's hard to back out of. Open it in a new window.
  • . . .and they don't exactly conform to either true NFS, or to true NTFS. They're great for local storage, but don't expect the fine granularity in access permissions you'd find in a more standard RAID. Oh, and since it's a sealed box, if one drive fails you have a choice: backup to other media, or unplug the box and send in for service. . . .
  • 1 terrabyte in 5.25"." 14 bucks a gig

    How much longer is it going to be before the entire Deja archive can fit inside one hard disk slot?

  • Whilst this is a piece of technology and as such falls within the domain of "News for Nerds" it most certainly isn't "Stuff that matters" is it? Companies are releasing new products everyday, and the release of a new "network storage solution" is hardly something people here are going to care about unless we are buying for companies.

    Is Taco getting paid to post this shit? It seems like it, because otherwise he really needs to remember that we're not all rich off of selling out to commercial interests. In fact, it'd be nice if every time Taco posts a story he stops dropping little comments about how much money he has and how many gadgets he's bought this week.

    Next time, leave this shit for the advertisements in the back of Computing Weekly.

  • Duh. Should read others posts. Yes, it runs FreeBSD. Cool.

    It has some limitations though. Can't share a volume between NFS and SMB at the same time. Damm.

  • Disk drives do not work in 'bytes'. Low level software/hardware interpretes a constant coded stream of bits back into bytes for our convenience, as with a communication protocol.

    The point, was that when you refer to, in most engineering docs I've ever read,
    1 Kilobyte, that measn 1024 bytes if it's memory
    and 1000 bytes if it's communication.
    And it's rather up in the air for other media.
  • Can you stream video over a 100mbs ether comfortably?

    Yep.. I do it all the time with my DVDs.. Rip the sucker to disc, eliminate the unneeded .vob files, and play away with the DVD player in 'file' mode..

    320G would hold almost 100 DVDs; Perhaps you should get one of these babies for the Geek Compound Anime collection!!
  • The problem is that alot of these cheap network drives don't have the hard-drives exposed. Some of the ones doing RAID 1 just use a standard IDE controller, too. So you need to remove the system from the rack and take it open it up to get physical access to the drives (unlike, say a Compaq Fibre Array)

    I don't know what the case with this particular model is though.

    I just had to hot swap a drive and was glad to find out that RAID 5 does indeed work :)
  • Disk drives do not work in 'bytes'. Low level software/hardware interpretes...

    Actually, every disk drive made within the past twenty years that I know of works in units of bytes called "sectors" or "blocks". Typically something like 512 bytes at a time. Anything smaller then that cannot be addressed directly; you have to read/write the entire block.

    A serial communications line is just that: Serial. A sequence of bits. Disk drives and related devices are block devices, and function that way at a fundamental level. That is the difference you are missing.

    1 Kilobyte, that measn 1024 bytes if it's memory and 1000 bytes if it's communication.

    Communication lines are almost always measured in bits per second, and not bytes per second, so you generally won't see anything-bytes for comm lines.

  • MP3 Server (Score:3)

    by blueg3 ( 192743 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @03:40AM (#769202)
    By the RIAA's calculations, that's enough to make an on-campus MP3 server that can hold almost 82,000 songs. Then, they could sue for over 2 billion dollars (at 25 grand per "copyright infringement"). Cool!
  • Well, your OS likes to think of the harddrive size as a power of two ... therefore, my 6.4Gb disk (according to the manufacturer) is only 6183Mb when fdisk looks at it
  • Even though it might be taken as an advertisment for a maxtor product, I still think it warrants a story. It *IS* an interesting story as it shows the advancement of storage technology and the availability of it.

    Even though I myself couldn't afford one of these babies, one can dream can't one? And to me that is indeed what it sounds like cmdr Taco is doing.

    Anyways, if you don't like slashdot anymore you're free to find a diffrent site to read. I for one am glad that we get news about new technology releases. I would probably not have heard about this for a couple of months if it had not been for /.

    -da Blyant.

  • 1 Terrabyte (Score:4)

    by Alan Livingston ( 209463 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @03:46AM (#769205)

    "...that fits in 1U (1.75") of rack space or 1 terrabyte in 5.25"

    Precisely how many bytes is a terrabyte? Is it a single terrestrial byte? Perhaps one byte as big as the earth? Maybe a byte made of dirt?

    I don't want a byte made of dirt. Perhaps I shall give it a squirt! Squirt that dirt!

    But I digress...

  • I don't know about the average reader of this site , but the suggested home entertainment useages for this item would be extremely impractical for me because

    1 - it costs 4 thousand dollars
    2 - I don't have a rackmount cabinet in my house

  • Disk space in the IDE Arena is now well under $10 a gigabyte (I think it was around $7 last I checked.) SCSI's are still significantly more expensive. And you can drop over a grand on just your SCSI card if you get a high end one.

    Those meta-refresh-is-zero-seconds sites are why I open almost all links with the middle mouse button now. When I want the page to go away, I just alt-w it. I also usually run with Java and Javascript off to defeat the sites that try to open new browser instances. Those blow goats too.

  • Well I am a bit biased here... but in terms of scalability, reliability and performance NetApp doesn't even come close with their Filers to EMC's Celerra.
    If you need direct-attach, then NetApp doesn't even have a product...
    --
    The world is divided in two categories:
    those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
  • "Can you stream video over a 100Mbs ether comfortably? Perhaps this is the backend for your DeCSS based DVD Jukebox? Or the mega Tivo extra hard drive (I s'pose that'd take some work tho). But you could fit a hundred or so movies on there... we're just inching towards it now."

    Now come on, we can all think of the uses for this. About ten racks of this could be used to augment ftp.cdrom.com (2 full terabytes of RAID 5, YEAH!).

    Also, Rob, remember, not all of us get a $5000 a week check from andover.net. Not all of us have that Sony VAIO laptop with Debian 2.6. Not all of us have the selfish lust which you have, may I add, while still staying in your parents' house at Copenhagen, South Dakota (or wherever it is, I know for sure it's a European city in a midwestern state).

  • And when da whole room blows up because of the next Timothy McVeigh or a Tornado hits your build not only is your hardward distroyed, but your data as well. Remember, you need offsite storage to stay in business. Best thing would be to put onw quite distance from ya and mirror them across dedicated links. Second best, offsite tape backup. But having your backup in the same place as the original is asking for trouble!

  • At least all of the OTHER Maxtor NAS units are that way: capacity is listed as total drive capacity, either as individual drives or as a volume set. . .
  • Bare Naked Ladies would fit in one of these arrays?

    Going on means going far
  • Hey... Isn't Exabyte [exabyte.com] trademarked? They oughta sue! It's not fair that these hard drive manufacturers get to use the name of their company when describing HD capacity. They should send everybody cease and desist letters! Too bad they didn't have a patent! Think of the licensing fees they could charge!
  • Hell, at this HD's size, you could could probably store a few DVD-quality movies completely *uncompressed*. Well, maybe one. I really have no idea what MPEG-2 compression is capable of. Thanks for the URL. I've got a BT848 kicking around, so I might be able to help them out if their lawyers give them the go-ahead for source release.
  • Its a terrabyte drive that fits in a 5.25 rackmount, id say its a bit newsworthy, I dont know much about rackmount hard drive systems, so I dont know if this is a first, but its pretty interesting nonetheless.
  • To impress us, or simply a different media?

    The *only* place where 'storage' is measured constantly in powers of two is on-chip memory.

    Communication lines are almost always (correctly) measured with powers of ten. (as per the *correct* value of the metric prefixes) Oh wait, METRIC? I forgot. THE US hastes metric. They must have a 'pound-byte' and an 'oz-byte' and a 'ton-byte' and so on and so forth.... because powers of 10 are just not convenient.

  • That guy probably works for a hard drive company, and we all know they dont require any math skills, so they just teach them that 1000 gigs is one terrabyte.
  • I was just talking about this with a similar product yesterday. It was a disposable rack-mount NFS drive. Of course Raid 5 came up, but we realized the problem is that it's probably not very convienent to hot-swap a drive (where Raid 5 really shines) while the unit is still up and mounted.
  • Also, that page is one of those God-forsaken meta-refresh-is-zero-seconds pages. Sites that keep pulling you back suck ass

    Amen brother. I'd suggest everyone send an polite e-mail to the two e-mail addresses listed at the top of the page, expressing your disgust if you find this practice as horrible as I do. Yeah, they're probably only sales people (I guess, what's up with those WilsonMcHenry addresses?), but imagine the flak the web designers are going to get if 2 of their sales guys are flooded with "Your web site sucks!" messages ;)
  • I know that the Yotabyte is in there, somewhere.

    (Since someone in the media's bound to come up with this, when Yotabyte drives are first released, I may as well spare them the trouble. Whata Yota Bytes!)

  • Check out Exadrive [exadrive.com]. They're not shipping yet (AFAIK), but its 1.8 terabytes in 3U.
  • You could indeed buy the DVDs cheaper. But you would need some really serious equipment if you wanted to JUKEBOX them, that is, be able to play any one without having to manually load it into a drive. THAT'S the motivation behind buying these big disks - the jukeboxing.

    Tons of people like MP3s for this single reason alone. I only have a single CD player (as opposed to a 6 or 50 stacker, for example), and so when I'm in the mood for a variety of music I play MP3s with shuffle mode on. I just can't do that with my CDs. I listen to CDs when I feel like listening a single artist or album, and even then I sometimes just do it with the MP3s.

  • 640Gb? (Score:3)

    by Syberghost ( 10557 ) <syberghost@@@syberghost...com> on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @03:49AM (#769229)
    Hey, if this thing is 320Gb of Raid 1, that means it's got 640Gb of drives in it.

    That means if you could turn off the Raid mirroring, you can double the capacity.

    Wonder if it could be converted to Raid 5; assuming it's 8 HDs of 80Gb each, you could get 560Gb out of it with Raid 5.

    I wonder if I can get any more possibly false assumptions based on limited data from a press release into this post?

    -

  • Whilst this is a piece of technology and as such falls within the domain of "News for Nerds" it most certainly isn't "Stuff that matters" is it?

    WTF dude, get the chip off of your shoulder. How the hell could a geek NOT be excited about 320GB of storage?

    In my office full of geeks, I passed around this story and we were all pretty excited. We did a little math and it would easily hold all of our personal CD collections compressed to MP3. Hell, most of our individual collections would fit on there uncompressed. And then we talked about other uses for it (pr0n, movies, etc, etc) for 5-10 minutes. We decided you could fit contents of the average small record store, uncompressed, onto a couple of terabytes. A whole record store in less than $15,000 of storage.... jesus...

    So yeah, I'd say it passed the "geek interest test". Good story!

    Sure, maybe it's not as "important" as another GPL licsense violation story, but are we allowed to have some fun around here? Lighten up, dude. Take the rolled-up copy of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" out of your ass and enjoy being a geek for a change, OK?

  • "one terabyte (1,000 GB) in just five and a quarter inches of rack height.

    Hello, who flunked out of math class? Oh, I remember, the entire hard drive industry!

    One terabyte is

    1024 GB

    1,048,576 MB

    1,073,741,824 KB

    1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

    Yes, I know, they use decimal sizes to try and make their units bigger (pun intended). But why not measure storage devices the same way the programs do? That way, we can trust the hard drive manufacturers more than we do now.

    On an offtopic note, I am returning my three-year old Western Digital 2.5GB hard drive for a replacement (the warranty just expired a day after I called for the RMA, but there's a 60-day grace period! WOOHOO!). Anyone know what happens if they don't manufacture the drive I'm returning? Will I get a 13.6 or just a refabbed 2.5? The IDE interface on the drive is only PIO4, so I'd appreciate something better.

  • 14 bucks a gig for a DeCSS DVD jukebox? HA! (Score:5)

    by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @07:32AM (#769242)
    Hmm ... or, alternatively, you could spend $20 a pop to buy the actual DVDs, for less than 10 bucks a gig!!! (Possibly much less, depending on the length of the movie.)

    This sort of bass-ackwards thinking reminds me of the classic Onion article: New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them On Monitor [theonion.com].

    "Yes, the image is somewhat grainy and limited to just six frames per second," Welborne said. "But the technology will only improve as 466 MHz processors with more efficient Pipeline Burst Cache and Accelerated Graphics Ports with 10 MB VRAM become standard in the consumer marketplace. And when they do, the images will be remarkably crisp and detailed, every bit as good as that of, say, a 19-inch Philips-Magnavox TV."

    "This is incredible," said Wayne Messers, a Huntington Beach, CA, systems analyst who sampled the Presario 6000 last weekend at the National Computer And Electronics Expo in San Diego. "I'm watching TV, but there's a keyboard in front of the screen."

    Cheers,
    IT

  • Re:Expensive. (Score:3)

    by stripes ( 3681 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2000 @07:53AM (#769244) Homepage Journal
    If rackspace can cost $1000/U/month, then don't ya think it would be a good idea to find a better site for the boxen ?

    Multiple OC-12s are rather expensave arn't they :-) Seriously that figure is 3 to 4 years old, and for a high bandwidth location with forced air cooling and 3 day battery backup. I don't know what current figues are, I would expect them to be much lower in many places.

    My original point was merely that some places are really really expensave, and paying an extra $3500 to save 2U of rack space has a payback time mesured in months (two in this case).

    Heck, if that's what rackspace is going for these days, I'm converting my apartment into a colo facility =)

    You need a lot of bandwidth coming in to the facility, from multiple providers. Or at least on multiple fibre bundles. Better still if you are centrally located (to minimise lantency to both coasts). Lots of good places in the center of the USA to get land cheep, not so hard to find major switching centers (cheeper circuits), but kinda hard to find places close to multiple telcos.

    The other route to being a high cost colo is to have lots of ISPs show up where you are (like MAE-east/MAE-west), but those are hard to start, you normally have to bring a bunch of bandwith to the party and peer cheep for a while...

    And battery and/or gennerator back up is a must. Forced air cooling is very good. Humidity control is a must (normally the cooling does that for you, but just in case you want a alaska colo, you still need to control moisture even if cooling is taken care of by nature). Apartments tend not to provide much cooling, so ration out a big cunk of the bedroom for a chiller. They also don't normally have raised floor/drop ceiling, so chop off some more space to install them (or use all ladder racks and overhead cable runs, but you still need space for the cable runs).

    You'll be better off renting wharehouse space... (esp if you can find it close to a CO).

    Also rember Hurricane Eletric does way cheep rack space, and other places too...

  • The *only* place where 'storage' is measured constantly in powers of two is on-chip memory.

    Ummm, right. And what do we have hard disks for? Why, to store data from on-chip memory. When you are storing units which are based on powers of two, it makes sense to use ratings based on powers of two. Gee, whodathunkit?

    Communication lines are almost always (correctly) measured with powers of ten.

    This is because communication lines do not work with bytes. A comm line is a bit stream. The only thing you care about is how many bits per second are comming down that wire. Things like bytes and frames and such occur at higher protocol levels and do not affect the bit rate of the line.

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