4 TerraByte Drives

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
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Hitachi recently started to ship in US their 4 Terrabyte drive. My first ever computer hard disk was 5 megabytes. Yes, *mega* bytes. Not Gigabytes. That was 30 years ago. So in that time, the capacity has increased nearly a million times!



The 4 TByte drive from Hitach retails for $300 to $350. I don't remember what I paid for my 4 MegByte drive but I think it was more than this. That IBM drive failed a year later. Ironically, IBM sold its hard disk business to Hitachi. In turn, Western Digital is buying Hitachi hard disk business.

If you are just dealing with audio, 4 Tbyte drive is not of much value to you. But for video, it is a godsend. To put things in context, a full Blu-ray disc uses 0.05 TBytes of space. So every 20 takes 1 Tbyte. A 4 Tbyte drive therefore can hold 80 discs. So as you see, in that context, this is not that big of a drive.

What is nice about a 4 Tbyte drive is that you need fewer of them to build a server to hold your library. It is relatively easy to stuff 8 or 10 drives in a system. Going to 20 or 30 is much harder in the form of needing for drive interfaces, and large enough case to hold them all. When I started to think about building my server, the largest drive was 1 Tbytes and 1.5 Tbyte drivers were just being introduced. I waited to build my server and now I can build the same 20 to 30 Tbyte server with four times fewer drivers! The cost of drives is not that much lower (due to general shortages here due to flood in Thailand) but the cost of the enclosure and interfaces is much lower now.

Ah, what a joy it is to be in computing where everyday, millions of dollars is thrown at giving us something for nothing!

I set up server at our vacation house to record of air digital programs. I added a 1.5 Tbyte drive to it to hold the programming. At home we have the Comcast DVR that has a tiny drive and holds just a few programs. Imagine my surprise when I see our vacation house PC DVR tell me it has 50 episode of some daily program! It has recorded so much that I don't know I will ever be able to watch it all.
 

RBFC

WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
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Wow, that's huge capacity. I have a 2 TB drive for my audio server, and have ~700GB on it. That's a lot of CDs, too. Also have some hi-res files, including DXD (which I can't even play yet..) I can't imagine getting access to that much music (almost 6X current) to fill a 4TB!

Lee
 

garylkoh

WBF Technical Expert (Speakers & Audio Equipment)
Sep 6, 2010
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www.genesisloudspeakers.com
I thought 1TB was a lot...... until I started ripping my vinyl at 24/192. Now, 4TB seems like enough if I have two of them :D

Any word on the reliability? The problem with the largest available at the time has always been that the reliability of just one-size down is far better. And 4TB may take more than 24hrs to back-up!
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
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It just started to ship. The reviews on Newegg are positive right now. It runs very cool which is a nice bonus and likely results in more reliability. Should know more in a couple of months.

In general, it is best to use some kind of redundancy anyway.
 

rblnr

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
May 3, 2010
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A good source for drives btw is otherworldcomputing.com good enclosures and chipsets, their stuff has proved to be more reliable than, say Lacie, under heavy use in post-production. they have a few four tb options now with more to come I'm sure
 

Kal Rubinson

Well-Known Member
May 4, 2010
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Hitachi recently started to ship in US their 4 Terrabyte drive. My first ever computer hard disk was 5 megabytes. Yes, *mega* bytes. Not Gigabytes. That was 30 years ago. So in that time, the capacity has increased nearly a million times!
Yup. I saved some of my old DEC literature and it shows that the cost for the 5mb Winchester drive was $3500. So the cost per byte has decreased even more significantly.

Boy, did I think I was King of the Hill after I added that drive to my PDP-11.
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
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Seattle, WA
Yup. I saved some of my old DEC literature and it shows that the cost for the 5mb Winchester drive was $3500. So the cost per byte has decreased even more significantly.

Boy, did I think I was King of the Hill after I added that drive to my PDP-11.
Don't make me feel old :). I also worked on those PDP-11 and their disk cartridges. My post above was relative to my PC hard disk which came way later. I just looked up the cost on Wiki. It was $1500 in *1980* dollars!
 

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