Perusing some information about CG editing in film, I read about studios that have numerous hard drives, each with sizes noted in terabytes.
How expensive are these disks? Are there any Petabyte drives out there? Anything larger?
Networked drives are cheating, but I’ll take that as an answer, too. What companies have the largest databases?
You can buy one terabyte hard drives off the shelf from Lacie but when you read about capacities into the multiple terabytes, they must be talking about RAID arrays.
I can’t imagine how long the defrags would take on those.
What about physical size? In 1984, a mainframe computer at my high school had a pair of hard drives, each the size of a washing machine. Five whopping megabytes each.
I’ve seen the 500GB Lacie External drives MFG#300721 which are single disk, 250GB is the largest ATA/IDE drive, and 147GB is the largest SCSI drive. Most systems you see in this storage size range are RAID arrays consisting of multiple drives striped for redundancy.
Mike
Hitachi has just announced a400GB ATA HDD and they have had a 300GB out for a little while now.
Lol, DASDs?
The ones we have now at work are called ‘Shark DASDs". Considerably different then those in 84’ (I was only 4yrs old). These refrigerator sized storage units now hold many, many terabytes of data when chained together. But if you open up the units, there are dozens of SCSI 40gb RAID devices hooked together. Crazy.
Hard drive arrays - what you call networked - are not cheating. That’s how huge capacity systems are put together. The company I last worked for bought a Teradata server with two processor nodes and an array of 112 drives. Mind you that includes mirroring redundancy so half that number represents the usable space. I don’t recall what the total capacity is but it was over two terabytes. Withing the database itself we started with 1.9 Terabytes which was for the user one single contiguous chunk of space. Teradata is the king of vastly huge databases and the system I described is one of their smaller ones.
When you get past DOS centric operating systems like windows you no longer have to contend with each drive being addressed by a separate drive letter.
Modestly large capacity drives generally have the lowest cost per byte. I just added a 200G Hitarchi for photo editing. When I get the rebate check it will cost about $100. That’s less than half what I paid for my first hard drive (Added a 20mb Seagate ST-225 to a Kaypro PC in 1988 IIRC) and has about 20,000 times as much capcity in a smaller package. The equivalent capacity of ST-225s would fill about 700 cubic feet of space without space for cooling and getting power to all of them.
Capacity in ultra small drives is a different matter. The Hitachi microdrive measures 2-5/32" x 1-15/16" x 3/16", it can fit in a matchbook. I have one of the 1GB models for my camera but the 4gb model is commonplace and can be had for about $200. Not sure what the largest capacity is.
I reall yhat eto do this to all of you…But check this machine out. Talk about serious steroids. And they do sell them with 1 terebyte HD. 
Enjoy drooling over the specs.
whoa…I was typing waaay too fast…It should read: I really hate to do this to you…but…
fiddling around with that comp i got the price up to $167,049,899,983,295.00 :rolleyes:
The NT-derived Windows systems do not use drive letters, and never have. For instance, if you peruse a boot.ini file in the root of an NT/2000/XP/2003 drive, you will see something like “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)” used to access a drive.
Win32, the most commonly used SDK on Windows, does provide the ability to reference drives by letter, but it is not required. The vast majority of users probably use drive letters, as does much of the software written out there. Windows NT-based systems also support a POSIX API that does not use drive letters, either.
NTFS, the most frequently used file system with NT-derived Windows systems, allows multiple drives to be grouped into volumes. The maximum size of a single volume is 18 exabytes[sup]*[/sup], although there is a practical limit in terms of RAM available to the CPU for complex file operations. Note that a single server can have multiple volumes (again, assuming sufficient system resources available). This has been true since Windows NT 3.1, from the early 90’s.
[sup]*[/sup]This is why file functions, like Win32’s GetFileSize, allow a pointer to a second 32-bit value to be passed: to store high-order double-word of the file size.
I’m not really on topic here, but I’m really impressed with the iPod’s hard drive! They can be as big as 40GB and the iPod itself is only about 4" x 2.5" x .5".
There is a similar but slightly bigger MP3 player/hard drive from …erm…erm… Creative Labs? It’s also 40GB.
Unfortunately Podsy is a delicate thing and after less than a month I’m already having problems with using it as a hard drive.
This got me thinking… I want to upgrade the hard drive in my laptop. It is a 40GB drive, and I want something larger. Is swapping out a laptop hard drive a difficult task? What’s the best way to backup the data on my current HD?
This exact issue was discussed a while ago on the unboard. The largest magnetic media hard drives currently shipping are 320 gig ATA drives. 400 and 500 gig drives are in development and are expected to be in the retail pipeline shortly. The Lacie 400 and 500 megs external units are a pair of ganged 200/250 meg ATA drives intenally, attached to an interface board that “presents” to the system like a single 400 or 500 meg drive. These are not single drives.
I confirmed this directly with Lacie.
Getting a DVD burner is a good way, and you can use the DVD burner in the future. It should only take about 8 DVDs to copy all your files.
That’s only if you don’t mind re-installing windows and your programs.
I mean, assuming you’ve filled all 40GB
Hehehe, sorry about all the incoherance! I mean it should take only 8 DVDs if you’ve filled it.
Not on newer laptops. Most laptops I’ve worked on in the past 4 or 5 years have had a setup where the hard drive was designed to be easy to swap. The drives themselves are generally encased in a little adapter which makes it so replacement is a matter of unscrewing a panel, giving the old drive module a tug, sticking the new one in, and replacing the panel. When you replace the drive, the only issue is that once you’ve got that module out, you won’t have an identical module to replace it with – you’ll have a bare hard drive. You need to figure out how to get the old drive out of the module and put the new one in, which is usually a matter of four screws and a ribbon cable (like a desktop drive, but with smaller screws).
Here’s what a Doper had to do a couple of years ago.
Hopefully, yours is newer and easier.