What You Think Is The Ideal Hard Drive Capacity?
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OhSnapWord
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It all depends on what you plan on doing on the computer. For some people, 500GB is enough, whereas other people have digital media collections that take up 500GB.
With the availability of huge external drives, backing up a 1TB drive isn't a problem. I have a 2TB backup drive myself.
With the availability of huge external drives, backing up a 1TB drive isn't a problem. I have a 2TB backup drive myself.
Gee you must download a lot of stuff..
OhSnapWord
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Not really. I subscribe to the rule of thumb that the backup drive needs to be at least the same size as the drive you are backing up.
Your really saying that it does not have to be accurate or reliable for every situation, Rule of thumb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What I was driving at in my part of the quote is backing up large drives. Sure I'd like to have a large drive in my system but my only concern is how to back it up. If I was to fill up a terabyte drive and lost every thing on it I think I'd have a stroke.
So what do you do? Spend the money to get a matched set and mirror them? Or just get 1 and take the risk?
I see now that the prices of terabyte drives is dropping and the smaller drives are equal to or higher. It appears to me that drive makers are playing the same game the ram makers are. That is to shoo out the older tech by making the new tech cost less and the old tech cost more. Next step in that parade is to start making the older tech scarce. When they reach that point the appeal of large terabyte drives won't be driven by cost, it'll be driven by availability.
Ok so the big boys are making drives more and more reliable with each new generation that hits the market. But for old school types like me that appeal is a little too nerve racking.
So what do you do? Spend the money to get a matched set and mirror them? Or just get 1 and take the risk?
I see now that the prices of terabyte drives is dropping and the smaller drives are equal to or higher. It appears to me that drive makers are playing the same game the ram makers are. That is to shoo out the older tech by making the new tech cost less and the old tech cost more. Next step in that parade is to start making the older tech scarce. When they reach that point the appeal of large terabyte drives won't be driven by cost, it'll be driven by availability.
Ok so the big boys are making drives more and more reliable with each new generation that hits the market. But for old school types like me that appeal is a little too nerve racking.
ChristineBCW
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We build computers and servers for warehouses & distributors, audio and video studios, and four 4Tb drives in RAID 5-6-10 is nothing to them. Those are replacing six, seven 2-Tb drives, or even 3-Tb drives, and they'll grow into 6-7-8 drives within a year. The big networks will have a couple of shelves with 10-12 even 24 large-as-possible Tb drives.
A law-firm's digital library used to be adequate on 500Gb of server storage, but those resources have mushroomed as well. Put in each main servers with backup servers, and everyone has responsive and protected access.
Hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, health care providers - they all store their own data and all of those are required to have backups-of-backups. Lotsa storage, lotsa FAST storage.
For home-media servers, for customers who don't want to be subscribers to everything but want their entertainment on their own schedules, then a lot of Tb drives is eaten by files instead of handling disks constantly. We have well over a thousand customers with 4 or 5 2Tb or 3Tb drives, often half-full and ready to upgrade to the 4Tb drives.
For people that enjoy supporting DRM, they don't need the hardware - just keep paying subscriber fees constantly.
That's the trade-off - own it and allocate capacity and resources for ownership to use on your own schedule as often as wanted, or subscribe it and use it when the outside-services and laws allow.
A law-firm's digital library used to be adequate on 500Gb of server storage, but those resources have mushroomed as well. Put in each main servers with backup servers, and everyone has responsive and protected access.
Hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, health care providers - they all store their own data and all of those are required to have backups-of-backups. Lotsa storage, lotsa FAST storage.
For home-media servers, for customers who don't want to be subscribers to everything but want their entertainment on their own schedules, then a lot of Tb drives is eaten by files instead of handling disks constantly. We have well over a thousand customers with 4 or 5 2Tb or 3Tb drives, often half-full and ready to upgrade to the 4Tb drives.
For people that enjoy supporting DRM, they don't need the hardware - just keep paying subscriber fees constantly.
That's the trade-off - own it and allocate capacity and resources for ownership to use on your own schedule as often as wanted, or subscribe it and use it when the outside-services and laws allow.
I think what's ideal changes by the computer being used.
Media and games make my big desktop take a 2TB drive, my media centers all have 1TB. With windows Home Server the backup engine itself links all duplicated files across computers to the same physical copy it has and compresses the backup so All I really need to do then is mirrior that drive onto something else in case it fails. Not counting drives used as mirrors, I have 10TB of storage just in 2TB drives in my apartment.
Media and games make my big desktop take a 2TB drive, my media centers all have 1TB. With windows Home Server the backup engine itself links all duplicated files across computers to the same physical copy it has and compresses the backup so All I really need to do then is mirrior that drive onto something else in case it fails. Not counting drives used as mirrors, I have 10TB of storage just in 2TB drives in my apartment.
ChristineBCW
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If I do a low-cost RAID, I'm probably using a Motherboard's RAID and I can usually use low-end drives (as opposed to WD Blacks, or Seagate Constellations, etc - the so-called 'enterprise' level drives, which contain some extra electronics 'smarts' for monitoring and feedback to onboard systems). Let's say you'd want some ASUS board with three Seagates $189 4th DM0004 drives.
I'd make you buy a 4th one, immediately. But wouldn't let you use it. It'd be in your case, cold, unattached so that if one of those low-end drives failed, you'd have an immediate identical replacement.
Low-End Drives tend to change electronics every few months (or actually, per new assembler house) and, while the RAIDs are usually smart enough to 'accept', they do not operate at Best Performance levels with different electronics and drive-mech's.
If you're paying twice the price for Enterprise Drives, those units usually stay in production (or at least available thru retail channels) for years.
Then, there are questions of expandability. If you get into the 4-5 drive RAIDs, you really DO want a dedicated RAID card because that card's support for problems is so much greater than a Motherboard Maker's "support" (cough cough gag gag).
And once I start using dedicated RAID cards, those often 'need' the advanced electronics of Enterprise type drives. Same as low-end NAS boxes 'need' something in the WD Red Drive range and above.
If you want to have fun with a bunch of dust-collecting parts in the closet, cobble together 3-4 drives as a RAID (have a separate Boot Drive - much easier) and play with that. Mixing capacities (and SATA types) results in a Lowest-Common-Denominator Minus Something RAID, but that's a pretty fun platform to learn with.
(The brand-name INTEL boards have good RAID support, but no other MB maker really supports their RAID levels beyond 'curiosity' levels. If you want the faster RAIDs, go to AMD boards which have SATA-IIIs across the board and use the best of the SATA memory controllers.)
We're not taking commercial here, we're talking the average Joe home computer user.
Sure some environments require larger and multi drive setups. But to Joe or Jane average user that sort of setting is over kill. And very costly.
As for your DRM comment sounds like you like to advocate pirating media and here such discussion is frowned upon.
Sure some environments require larger and multi drive setups. But to Joe or Jane average user that sort of setting is over kill. And very costly.
As for your DRM comment sounds like you like to advocate pirating media and here such discussion is frowned upon.
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