Hard drive cheapness, capacity begins to be a problem !!

[Alpine]

Backup invokes Attack of the Terror Bytes!!

BARGAINS ABOUND for PC disk drives. On a good week, you can pick up an 80GB drive for around $20 after rebates and anywhere from 120 to 250 GB drives for under $100 after rebates. External USB 2.0 drives have dropped under $1 per GB and are dancing close to $0.50 per GB, depending on the vendor, the store, and the phase of the moon.


Ironically, the fast forward on disk drive storage is only running a half step behind the current CPU craziness. Sure, there's 64-bit AMD and dual-core Intel, but what good is all that fancy silicon to the common man without software to drive it? Neither dual-core nor 64-bit are driving most sane, reasonable people to stores to dump their perfectly adequate 32-bit processors because the performance benefits aren't there unless a) you're a gamer or b) you're a power-user that sorts huge databases on your desktop and are too cheap to spring for a workstation.

If you shop correctly today, you can buy a terabyte of disk for under $1000. Exactly how much under $1000 again depends on the sale of the week. But putting that amount of disk space to useful work is going to require non-trivial efforts for The Rest of Us, assuming you can fill it all up. In theory, you can put around 100 DVDs worth of video material into half a terabyte (200-300 hours). But there's the nasty little detail that the MPAA and TV producers really don't want you copying things onto a home server for your convenience. Plus there's simply the time involved in shuffling 100 DVDs in and out of the DVD reader.

Companies have already sprung up to load iPods and MP3 players with legit CDs because people just don't have the time they'd like to copy stuff from one format to another. And we even haven't tapped into the hassles and time of going from video tape into disk on any sort of massive scale.

Say, for the sake of argument, you manage to fill up that terabyte of disk space without going crazy. The next problem is backing it up. Current generation DVD-DL allows you to put around 9GB per disk, assuming you can find the media on store shelves. Trust me, it's buried among the R+ R+ RW and there's not a lot of it, so to back up a terabyte is going to take around 100-105 disks. That's non-trivial. Plan B for backup is to plunk down another $1000 or so and build a mirror server. Or get more complicated and not-off-the-shelf and make everything RAID.

But that begs the question as to why you have to run a data centre operation for your own household. The hard-core screwdriver heads will wave their hands and say they can solve it all in a couple of weekends, but they're also the types that can afford to spend the time on such hobbyist adventures. Now, take the above scenario and double the amount of disk space to 2TB in about 18 months or less. See how life gets ugly? There are going to have to be some performance improvements in how video is distributed to the personal desktop/home as well as some legal improvements as to how it is handled before you can even start talking about terabytes to the home. In addition, some of the "GeeWiz" schemes like Blu-Ray or other optical media need to come out of the closet and get put into boxes.

Source:

The INQ!