Considering the sum of all of my storage devices ...
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Obvious missing option (Score:5, Insightful)
A black pigment on a bleached mesh of wood fibers. I have quite a lot of useful information in that format.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting. How many Libary of Congresses can it hold?
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
I'll just be over there trying to snap the strap on my overalls. Dahurrr.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:3)
Exactly one.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
I highly doubt that you have more information in 'ink on paper' format than could fit on a single DVD.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on how you measure storage. Bytes, ounces, or square inches?
I have a small room with somewhere approaching a half ton of books (about 30 large rubbermaid containers stuffed full). I have an additional 4-5 rubbermaids full of photographs and developed negatives. I've also got a safe with important papers.
In the same room, in fact inside the safe, I have an old IDE 500GB hard drive I use as tertiary backup storage (install it in an old machine from time to time, copy off new stuff to it, put it back in the fireproof box, put box in safe) in case my primary drive dies and both of the frequently-swapped drives that I use as primary and secondary backups fail.
The 500GB drive holds orders of magnitude more information than the books. But the books take up orders of magnitude more space and weight.
I answered "disk" because even though I go down and grab a book to read occasionally, I don't consider it or my photograph archive "active/available". In fact, there's really only one storage medium that I would really consider "active/available", and that's the primary hard drive in my desktop. Everything else is backups of that, or information I have to go down into the basement and dig out of stacks of bins to retrieve.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
Books are big and bulky, but have a very low data density.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
Books are big and bulky, but have a very low data density.
That's not entirely true, it's just that a lot of the data is less important to you (ie, texture of the pages) and/or the storage capacity isn't exploited fully (if there were a way to access books on an atomic level...).
But yeah, in their current implementation, pretty inefficient.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
I used to have such huge amounts of retro storage media as well. Thousands of records, a basement full of books and photos.
May I take this opportunity to recommend flood insurance.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
It also depends on how you interpret it.
"Active/available" rules out nearly all of my optical discs, as they have been ripped to hard disk and put into storage.
Also "sum of all of my storage devices", does that mean capacity or number of?
If capacity, then spinning magnetic media wins, obviously.
If number of devices, then "black pigment on bleached mesh of wood fibers" wins. (Although THAT particular category is steadily being replaced with solid state for me...)
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:3, Insightful)
no you don't. Even 1000 books it's a tiny amount of storage in digital form.
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:4)
Not if they are on MSWord .doc format ....
Re:Obvious missing option (Score:2)
Myself. (Score:2)
In that case, the most complex thing I own, hence the thing with the greatest amount of information, is my body.
10^13 cells of different types in different states in a very specific order.
Re:Myself. (Score:2)
In a cloud (Score:4, Funny)
Somewhere in the troposphere
Re:In a cloud (Score:2)
"To the cloud!"
Re:In a cloud (Score:3)
Somewhere in the noosphere
not so fast (Score:5, Insightful)
DVDs, hands down.... (Score:2)
Of course, that's partly because the home desktop recently crashed, so its hard drives aren't currently "active/available", while the DVDs can be popped into the player or the laptop. But even so, a DVD is about 4-5GB depending on how full it is, and I've got less than 2TB of hard drive even if it all worked. and several hundred DVDs.
Re:DVDs, hands down.... (Score:2)
Re:not so fast (Score:2, Funny)
Do they realize they have a few hundred blew rays strewn around the living room. It adds up...
I'm picturing a living crowded with guys all named Ray, all with big smiles on their faces.
Re:not so fast (Score:4, Insightful)
I have roughly 4TB of on-line storage. If I'm remembering my numbers correctly, that's 468 DVDs, or about 5,300 data CDs. I've got nowhere near that many plastic disks sitting around.
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
What do you pay for that?
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
I have a lot more than that, but it's mostly compressed so it comes in at ~5TB.
Got more total storage than that though.
Content is cheap and plentiful. It's easy to gorge yourself even without being a pirate.
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
Don't count non-rewritable ones, but just one big spindle of 100 blank DVD-Rs is nearly 500GB of available storage. I had to consider that before choosing hard drive.
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
Gaah.
I should have said "non-writable" not "non-REwritable".
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
Re:not so fast (Score:4, Interesting)
I considered that, but I have over a dozen LTO-4 tapes. Do you realize how many DVD's worth of data will fit on a single LTO-4?
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
So I reasoned that active/available applied to writable optical media meant the sum of those I have with data on them, plus the sum of those I have on hand ready to write to.
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
Actually, truly passive was when I was shoveling my life's memories into a dumpster after a flood. Lots of passive media looking like pig slop.
May I again take this opportunity to recommend flood insurance. B)
Re:not so fast (Score:2)
May I take this opportunity to recommend rubbermaid?
Obscure (Score:2)
Bubble memory, wafer tape, and disk packs.
Hipster (Score:2)
Re:Hipster (Score:3)
What, holographic laser-writeable poly-methyl methacrylate cubes?
Bedposts with notches cut into them?
C'mon don't keep us hanging!
Re:Hipster (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obscure (Score:3)
Bubble memory, wafer tape, and disk packs.
What? No paper tapes [wikipedia.org], no punched cards [wikipedia.org]?
Get off my lawn, noobie!
Some on disk, some online (Score:2)
By byte, most of my active storage is on hard disks and backed up to removable hard disks. That's mostly because I've got large repositiories of digital images that I really should cull someday. By file count and importance, probably most of my active storage is now on line, in the back rooms of my web sites, accessable through wikkawiki front ends. Backup is dual: I count on the host's automated backup for dailies and use their tools to do a downloadable dump every month or so.
HDD and tape (Score:3)
About 3TB on ~10 hard drives and about 2.1TB on tape (mostly LTO1, some LTO2 and DDS4). About 830GB on DVDs. However, I also have a lot of music on records and tapes (both cassettes and R2R) and a lot of video recordings on VHS, but all those do not count, since they are analog, so there is no way to measure them in bytes.
Re:HDD and tape (Score:3, Funny)
Nobody cares.
Re:HDD and tape (Score:2)
Ugh, DDS4 ... Are you sure those are still usable ? Never seen any storage media fail so often as DDS tapes. I usually consider HD as the backup of the data on a DDS.
Re:HDD and tape (Score:3)
I still use DDS3 at home, letting Amanda balance the backups so that only about 12GB are backed up each night. I bought a DDS3 drive way back when and a bunch of tapes for it. When the drive died, a DDS4 drive was way cheaper than any other tape system and I could re-use my tapes. I replace them with DDS4 media as they become unreadable, but that's actually pretty rare.
I certainly wouldn't buy a new DDS drive today, and if this one dies, I'm changing to a totally different system. Until that day comes, though, I can't say anything but good about it.
Re:HDD and tape (Score:2)
I use DDS for backup because it is slower than LTO. Not all of my computers can provide the 8MB/s that LTO needs when reading lots of tiny files (which is usually what is in the system drives) over network. I use LTO mostly for archiving.
Re:HDD and tape (Score:2)
Well, that comes back to Amanda. Its default operation is to spool dump files in a directory on the backup server, then feed the tape drive from the local files. You can spend an hour copying /usr from a SPARCstation without shoeshining your LTO./p
Re:HDD and tape (Score:2)
I'm using Windows and I usually do not have enough free space on my hard drives for that.
Most by what metric? (Score:4, Interesting)
By importance most of my storage is DNA and cellular
By data amount most of my storage is (sadly) dangerously failure prone magnetic disks.
Re:Most by what metric? (Score:3)
Actually, you can be fairly sure that by data amount, your DNA still wins over the magnetic disks.
Your neurons might store more, so that's still in the wet-works.
Re:Most by what metric? (Score:2)
I haven't met anybody that owns a disk with lesss than a few hundred kB of size in ages...
Re:Most by what metric? (Score:2)
DVDs (for now!) (Score:2)
If readonly media counts, then DVDs by far (at least while my raid is offline!). I count ~85 stargate dvds and ~50 star trek dvds, which come to ~675GB (assuming single-layer dvds), and that's just those two shows. Add a few disks of other series, and some films, and a stash of games, and it quickly will rise to quite a lot.
Once my raid is back online it's ~1.5TB of storage, so I'm not sure which I would vote then.
Re:DVDs (for now!) (Score:2)
Do you mean that you're not sure whether 1.5TB is larger than 675GB + X (assuming X is less than 675GB), or what?
Re:DVDs (for now!) (Score:2)
I mean that I'm not sure whether X is less than (1.5TB - 675GB).
My name is Joshua Foer (Score:3)
and I don't need any storage devices!
Re:My name is Joshua Foer (Score:2)
Not even biological ones? Vacuum data storage, great! Where do I get that?
Missing option... (Score:2)
My Brain (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My Brain (Score:3)
Sure it's obscure - your brain is the only one in existence. There's a lot of *human* brains out there but only one of *yours*.
And if you need a car analogy, I have one at the ready!
Re:My Brain (Score:2)
The same could be said of Hard Drives...
There are a lot out there but only 1 (ok well 12) are mine.
Therefore not quite as obscure as his brain but pretty close...
Re:My Brain (Score:2)
You and grandparent really have to look up the meaning of "obscure".
Re:My Brain (Score:2)
That was my first thought as well, but then I'm not sure if it's really true. I mean, I've got about 8 TB of harddrives at home, and a few more TB at work. Can my brain really hold that much? It's hard to say. How much space would a memory really take up? They definitely use lossy compression (very lossy!), so my gut says they're not as big as we'd think.
Most of my active/available storage is on hard dsk (Score:2)
Re:Most of my active/available storage is on hard (Score:2)
Donald Longueuil, is that you?
Analog vs digital. (Score:2)
I'm my own cloud, thanks (Score:3)
That depends which machine you ask. I have a fileserver at home with a few TB of hard drive space. From its perspective, most of my storage is on a hard drive. For desktop machines on my home LAN, a lot of files are on local drives while a huge shared pool of stuff is on the network. From my iPod's point of view, 32GB of my storage is on local flash media while the other 99% is on a WebDAV server somewhere (namely, that home fileserver).
So, my files (like almost everyone else's) are on hard drives, but very rarely are those drives in the machine I'm actually using at the moment.
Uh, in my brain of course... (Score:2)
Yeah, that squishy thing between your ears. You can STORE DATA IN THERE!!! Well, maybe most people can't these days...
Re:Uh, in my brain of course... (Score:2)
i dont think my brain could equal the amount of information my HDDs could hold, considering i have easily over 10 TB of active/usable storage on spinning platters
Re:Uh, in my brain of course... (Score:2)
Probably not. Estimates of the human brain's storage capacity vary widely, ranging from 100 TB (1x10^14 bytes) right on up to the highest estimate I've seen published at 3x10^19 bytes (zetabytes IIRC). So chances are hard drives aren't even close yet, though they may well get there in a few more generations of technology...
Re:Uh, in my brain of course... (Score:3)
My brain (Score:2)
Apart from my brain, which is an assumption as I honestly don't know what its capacity is, I'd say platter hard drives no contest. And likely will be for the foreseeable future. I don't own any LP records. My CD collection never eclipsed about 120 CDs. My DVD collection (including television series) maybe got to 200 DVDs. The only 'cloud' storage I have is my Gmail and Picasa gallery, which combined are likely less than 2GB. I recently received a RevoDrive, 120 GB, but haven't even opened the box yet. And if you're still using magnetic tape for anything it's time to get some portable (not just 'external', but portable ) USB drives.
My hard drive collection is probably around 4.5 to 5 TB. Backups of backups of personal photography and one-off copies of media and games. Speaking of, since when has a PC game needed over 17 GB of storage? That's absurd. Back in my day games fit on giant floppies, had no 'pictures' or sound more than beeps, and we liked it!
Well I like StarCraft 2 too ... but damn that's a lot of storage.
Bulk? Spinning metal platters. Accept no substitution.
Now backing up to hard drive instead of tapes (Score:2)
I probably have several hundred tapes from 60Megs to 1 G - but also have more new Terabytes sitting on the shelf, not even connected than they add up to. And that's counting the box of 3200bpi mainframe tapes in the basement (about to be bulk-erased and sold/given away)
The actually rotating Disk adds up to something well North of 30 Terabytes - and that's down from a high of about 60.
Between the ears (Score:2)
no contest (Score:2)
hdd: 820GB
flash+microsd: ~30GB
optical: lots but none active/available
tape: 0
online: ~500MB
hard drives beat the shit out of everything else in capacity.
CowboyNeal option (Score:2)
Dropbox (Score:2)
While most of my inactive (as in, open less than once a month) storage is on harddisk, the currently active storage is my Dropbox folder - present on harddisk on work and home PC, on SSD in my netbook and phone, and all of it backed up online. Since I consider this all just one storage spread over multiple media, there's no single option for me to pick.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:5, Funny)
You'd be surprised.
Play them backwards.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:3)
No, he's a walrus.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:2)
By weight, I think I have more vinyl albums than any other medium. But the amount of data they hold is relatively low.
Try telling that to a vinyl-audiophile-zealot!
For me, I'm not sure if the audio/video weight category goes to LPs or LaserDiscs.
My overall winner for weight and (3 dimensional) volume has gotta be books.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:3)
No. More or less 150-300 MByte.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:2)
The CD format "Red Book" was set to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's recording of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony Number Nine from the 1951 Bayreuth Festival
That format is played at 176,400 bytes per second which translates into 783MB.
So the CD has two to three times more data than the album it came from?
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:4, Insightful)
So the CD has two to three times more data than the album it came from?So the CD has two to three times more data than the album it came from?
Yes, precisely. Despite what audiophiles fervently believe, a CD holds much more data than a vinil record.
Analog data doesn't have infinite precision, at least not in the real world. Any data stream is characterized by a signal to noise ratio [wikipedia.org], which tells you how much of that data is useful information and how much is useless noise.
Vinil records, due to several reasons, have a significantly lower signal to noise ration than CDs, therefore hold less information.
Of course, there might be people who *like* noise, but that has nothing to do with how much information is available. One could synthesize a signal from a CD that sounds exactly like a vinil by adding noise, but you could never get all the information contained in a CD from a vinil record.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:3, Funny)
One could synthesize a signal from a CD that sounds similar to a vinil by adding noise
Obviously not an audiophile.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:3, Insightful)
To market it to an audiophile, you would describe it differently. You would claim that due to recording details, there's actually more information on the CD than the pure digital data. There are slight variations on the pits which contain those details of the sound which are normally only found only on vinyl. Now standard CD playing technology just ignores that information, but your product is able to access it and thus restore the complete quality of the music, as it is found on vinyl.
Oh, and if you are in CD sales business, too, you should not forget to add that this extra information is, of course, only on the original CDs from the shop, because those are made directly from the recordings. As soon as the music has passed a normal digital readout (as is the case for anything you copy on your computer), that extra information gets lost. Oh, and of course there are CDs which lack this information due to an inferior production process. Most shops ignore that issue, but if they buy the CD at your shop, they can be sure that the extra information is there. Of course the CDs are then a bit more expensive, because checking that the information is really there takes some effort. But if you are a real audiophile, you surely will want to invest that money to be sure you only get the best quality.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:3)
And don't forget to demagnetize [audioasylum.com] your CDs.
Re:By filesize or media volume? (Score:2)
Or, woosh!
Re:Paper! (Score:2, Funny)
On a roll, in your bathroom.
Re:Hard drives are cheapest (Score:2)
yup. I paid a bit more, like $90 a few months ago, but, I got 4 drives and raided them.
2 TB was big enough that I could copy my entire previous array onto one drive. Now, all I need to do is wait 2-3 more years, and I can copy this whole array onto one drive, and build a new array,....and let the data keep on spinning.
Re:one (Score:2)
First Tape! Punched tape that is!
Re:one (Score:2)
First Tape! Punched tape that is!
You damn younglings, punched cards it is the one true medium. Now get off my lawn.
Re:one (Score:2)
Re:Organic (Score:3)
You obviously don't have enough MP3s...
Re:not all optical media are full... (Score:2)
While the total capacity of all of my optical media is far greater than what I have online on disk, I rarely touch an optical disk once I have "ascended" it.
Most of my CDs haven't seen the light of day in over 10 years.
I forsee when I will be able to say the same of most of my DVD/BD disks.
Re:My storage space (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tape... (Score:3)