Just saw my first Terrabyte Ext. Hard Drive

Stonefield wrote on 2/21/2006, 7:09 PM

Well this is a first, I saw advertised in the London Drugs Store flyer the first Maxtor 1000 gig external hard drive. This is the Maxtor One Touch III drive and it come out just a couple WEEKS after I saw the 500 gig version.

It seems wide as there might be two 500 gig drives side by side in there. The price in Cdn bucks is $1099. Seems a bit overpriced. You can buy four 300gig drives with enclosures for $800. 1.2 Terabytes for under a grand.

All just in time as HDV is goin consumer mainstream.

Great time to be involved with digital video.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 2/21/2006, 7:37 PM

There have been 2TB to 5TB SAN units available for quite some time. They've been pretty pricey though. I've seen a few rack-mount servers that hold 8 drives in a 3-space rack. Once again, rather expensive.

It makes me wonder about the early days of DVD production. Back when i saw the first DVDs on store shelves, about the biggest hard drive available was maybe 100MB. That means you'd need an array of 45 drives to hold the the prepared files for creating the master disc. I'm not sure what compression was available for the source material back then, but i'm willing to bet it wasn't as small as DV. Hollywood wouldn't have used 4:1:1 to produce DVDs from film anyway. If we guess maybe 3:1 compression then 100 minutes would have needed close to 600 drives (!!!!!!!!) to hold the captured video. The mind boggles.

Harold Brown wrote on 2/21/2006, 8:06 PM

I think I saw this one at Best Buy. Yes, it had 2 HDD's in it.

farss wrote on 2/21/2006, 8:27 PM

We've had a Lacie 1TB unit for maybe 12 months, 1394a, 1394b and USB 2. You guys need to get out more!

It's big, noisy and yes it's 4 x 250G dirves in RAID 0. Don't trust anything that cannot be replaced on these things.

Bob.

Quryous wrote on 2/22/2006, 9:08 AM

That's nothing, just saw an announcement that Dell would be selling Terra FLOP HDDs soon. Yea, I know better, but that is what the announcement said. "Terra FLOP HDD."

Think somone's brain flopped?

Chienworks wrote on 2/22/2006, 9:17 AM

Actually it's Tera, not Terra (which is our planet).

"FLOPS" is Floating Point Operations Per Second, which is usually a measure of processor speed, not drive space. Teraflops would of course be trillions of floating point operations per second.

Quryous wrote on 2/22/2006, 12:11 PM

Like I said, I know better. Bad enough to put Terra, but FLOPS, which has nothing to do with HDD, which was the other part of the phrase in the announcement?