Best Pricepoint for 6-10 TB of Ext HD Storage Space?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I went off to look at prices on 6 TB external hard drives and thought for a moment I’d hit the wrong link and was staring at prices for new automobiles or small houses. Holy Schlamoley.

Well, heck, I could buy six 1-TB drives and daisy-chain them a heckuva lot more cheaply. Maybe 60 of them, for Pete’s sake, and a tin of caviar go to with them.

Where’s the best price-point for that much storage space, with secondary consideration going to “not likely to break down” ? It would be a set of drives that would only go online now and then, and what gets laid down would rarely get deleted and never get edited. Files would nearly all be in the 400 MB to 6 GB size range.
Edit: FireWire, preferably.

2

You can get one terabyte drives for around $ 200- 225 bare and 225- $250 with FW/USB/SATA interface (on sale). The cheapest thing to do is simply use a 7 port USB 2.0 hub with external drives. I’m not sure if there are FW “hubs” as I’'ve only seen FW ports as PCI card ports or connected directly off the MB.

If you are looking for bullet proof redundancy then some RAID type drive bay chassis setup with back up power and mirrored drives is going to be required, and you are going to have to open your wallet much wider.

3

I was just going to daisy-chain FW drive to FW drive to FW drive. Why would I need a “hub”?

4

Also, just so we’re clear there are no “6 terabyte drives” as a single drive. Anything much over a terabyte ( as a single data space) is a drive array of some sort using (typically) multiple 1 terabyte drives in a RAID emulation configuration.

5

You wouldn’t. I’m (obviously) not a FW person & misspoke. FW chaining per your note is obviously the way to go.

See this drive as a good deal.

I’d stay away from Western Digitals as my 2- 4 year old WD USB externals have been dying lately.

6

The problem here is that you want a contiguous and fault tolerant 6TB. Here’s what I’d do:

Pick up cheap PC bundle with gigabit NIC. A VIA C7 will handle things nicely while minimising power usage.
Add 3Ware or Areca 8-port card or similar and 8x 1TB drives. (6 for 6 TB, 1 for RAID, 1 for Hot Spare)
Hi Opal!
Install in case with 8x 3.5 bays. Note that you can convert a 5.25" bay to a 3.5" bay.
Configure drives as RAID 5 and a hot spare. Or RAID 6 if the contoller supports it.
Install and configure OS of choice.
Profit!

The highest-cost component will be the RAID card.

If you want faster access than gigabit then you’re going to have to install the drives in your local PC.

7

Hmm.

Probably should have mentioned that computer 1 is a PowerBook and computer 2 is a Mac Mini. Not installing any boards of any flavor in either one of those. (Well, I do have the PC-card CardBus slot on the PowerBook I guess).

I don’t need contiguous. This is all for passive storage of already-existing files. In fact, why be coy? We want backups of a library of movies, 80% digitized from VHS tapes rather than as commercial DVD, and if one of those DVDs got scratched would not want to re-digitize & burn. I was figuring “get an external drive the size of the Pacific Ocean and file-copy all those VIDEO_TS folders then stick it in a warehouse somewhere”

8

An SATA Blue-ray DVD burner for around $ 200 might be another archiving solution for video if you put it in an external SATA - USB case.. I saw one at Circuit City for less than $200.

9

Am I misreading that link? It doesn’t appear to be a Blu-Ray burner, just a player.

10

The problem you’re encountering is thus:

The average schmoe doesn’t want 6Tb of storage.

The averate 6Tb+ array is for business. Business criteria is: bigger bandwidth for more concurrent users, REDUNDANCY, and backup.

Running RAID is NOT A BACKUP SOLUTION.

It provides some time if you have a failed drive to recover, but it does NO good if your house catches fire (no big deal), your array is underwater (not as big a deal), or a bigass powerspike takes out the drive controller in your RAID array (big deal).

Is 6 TB your ultimate capacity requirement, or your immediate one? I’ve found if you stay closer to Joe Schmoe capacities (to date, a 3Tb unit is about a kilobuck, but that’s raw capacity, figger 2.2 Tb formatted), get two of those, and do an occasional backup, then store one in a firesafe.) cite: http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/firewire_3tb.htm

Use that for a year or two, then get the nearest Joe Schmoe 6 Tb unit, again, for a kilobuck and back up to the two units you’re currently using.

My native storage at home is a little over 2 Tb…but I find it’s backing up movies *I never watch * and not much else. Further, 1 Tb of that is an external unit that had a $0.60 fan fail. You want to lose your data over that? I pulled the end off the unit, stood it vertically so that it’s an inch off the table, and it stays cool, convectively, better than it did with the fan.

Netflix has become my offsite move backup service.

and I completely understand if you’re backing up media that doesn’t otherwise exist…at which point, I’d put it on the minum non-redundant storage space available, then burn it off to DVD and put the DVD’s in the firesafe.

11

For a little less money (and a little less storage, but future upgradability) you could get a drobo and 4 1 Tb drives:

But you’d only get 2.7 Tb of available storage space.

You’re swinging for the fences with that 6 Tb requirement. You can do it, but it’ll cost…and 4 years from now, you’ll buy a 6 Tb drive for $120 at Best Buy.

12

Wait four years… though by then you’ll need 60TB.

:wink:

13

Can someone bookmark that and tell me if I’m right four years from now?

14

Well, if you’re handy with Excel, http://www.alts.net/ns1625/winchest.html gives you more than enough historical data.

and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png actually plots it out for ya…the rule of thumb I’ve used is: Take the current date, minus 2 years and THAT drive capacity will be dirt cheap as it’s falling off the price curve.

15

At the risk of looking naive when looked back on five years from now, I can’t imagine why one person would need 6 terabytes of HDD space.

16

You’re not naive. The ‘640kb’ quote dealt with something ‘you didn’t have enough of’. IMHO, drive capacity is increasing faster than your ability to use it. I’ve got 250 Gb of music. 40 Gb of it I actually listen to. that’s 1/10th of the storage I have at home. In two years, it’ll be 1/100 of my storage and it won’t have grown significantly.

Once we get past the ‘video is huge, and takes up a lot of space’ mindset, what’s left after that to consume great quantities of data? (hint: your medical records, but who keeps a copy of their MRI’s at home on the fileserver?)

Drive capacity is growing at a rate faster than most people can consume it. My 8Gb iPhone is big enough to easily handle my needs away form the 320 Gb drive in my laptop…what happens when the cheap iPhone has 320 Gb and a 5 MB/s pipe to the internet?

17

Well, I thought of something that may need that much space. Several hours of HD footage captured for editing would quickly take up a fair chunk of it, and couple that with the finished output files, also in HD, it may add up to a lot of terabytes.

I know petabytes is going to be the buzzword for HDD space soon enough, so I guess I shouldn’t be too bewildered.

18

Video is the current hurdle, and raw video DOES consume a great deal of space…but I’m having a hard time seeing HD being supplanted by a replacement like it replaced SD. The point is not that there are things that consume a lot of space…the point is that storage is becoming less and less of an issue. Add up all the iPods, DVR’s, Laptops, file servers, etc in a geek house and the resulting total is pretty huge…

…but the average person could probably store all of their information ‘in the cloud’ (e.g. Google mail), get their video on demand, listen to XM radio, and not have a need for ANY storage at home.

Does it mean they aren’t using space? Nope, it’s just abstracted out and handled elsewhere (like when the guy at Hoover dam cranks up the big dial to make more electricity when the system needs it.

Storage is now an issue on portable devices…it won’t be in 10 years. My kids will have an iPod like device where the storage doesn’t matter. It won’t be a selling point. The device will be a video camera, video player, internet portal, game player, etc etc etc. And the guts won’t matter as they’ll have far surpassed the user’s needs.

19

My first advice would be to do some video editing and re-encode that stuff. Invest in something like the commercial Divx software and get to work re-encoding your video. I can encode a 1 hour program in Divx at 720x640 (DVD quality) 29fps in around 400MB. Unless you have thousands of movies, that should bring your storage requirements down a bit.

20

Hmph. 2Tb for less than $500.

buy two!