In light of the squeeze in hard drive prices ...
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Standing pat (Score:2)
I bought a couple of 2TB drives earlier this year when I decided to rip my entire DVD collection for streaming - one drive for the videos, one to serve as backup. I doubt I'd have bought any more for a while, even if prices were going to be stable.
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I had four 3TB drives priced at about $130 each in my cart at Newegg last Thursday and was narrowing down selection of the actual NAS in which to install them. I figured I'd make up my mind over the weekend and order it on Monday. I picked out the NAS, but when I went back to order the drives, the price had jumped to $210, limit one per customer. I had a budget of about $1000 for the NAS, but I'm now out of options until either Black Friday/Cyber Monday or whatever the date is that Western Digital brings
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Did you know about the impending doom/shortage before delaying your decision?
I can't see someone doing that intentionally when there's a known shortage of drives coming.
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I was peripherally aware of the news of the floods and that it would impact drive production, but didn't know the full extent of the damage at the time. Even factoring that in, a price jump of that magnitude over a weekend isn't something one would normally expect.
I'm pondering whether to delay the NAS project until January (it's not terribly necessary) or to go with lesser drives at $160 each. I'll probably wait, though.
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Still, finding news like that out must've been a shock. My supplier actually informed me Friday that prices were increasing rapidly already. I wonder if SSDs are impacted by the facilities - probably not, but the demand for them will rise and so will the prices. SSDs are okay for an OS drive, but any large storage requirements are going to be spinning drives.
I think I saw a 1 TB SSD for $2000. Ouch.
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The other issue is the system overhead - the server is always on, plus an HTPC on every TV I could want to stream to. As well, the network infrastructure has to be able to handle the possibility of multiple streams, so the router has to kick ass. This is against the $60 stand-alone player I picked up at Walmart which handles the vast majority of formats. To me, there seems to be very little upside to networking for this.
Having lived thru this for about a decade, its gone from experimental cutting edge $1000 per box 250 watt full size PC hardware with roaring fans in the early 00s to 5 watt $300 hardware accelerated playback where even the lowest end consumer gear is far in excess of whats necessary. I think you'd be surprised at how little it takes with 2011 hardware instead of 2002 hardware.
The server is always on anyway, the "htpc" like my old zotec zbox draws a bit more than a clock radio but not much.
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What's so complicated? Do you get lost in the local mall too? it's really not that hard to sort out 500 or even 2000 DVDs.
Organization is pretty obvious. It's the same method used by Blockbuster, Virgin Megastore, or even iTunes. You can even employ some sort of search tool if you like. Or you could just view all of your DVD covers in one big pile MCE/Kaledescape style.
"Smart playlists" are also an interesting option.
Unless you are using a samba share and a DOS prompt, the options aren't quite as dire as yo
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> his is against the $60 stand-alone player I picked up at Walmart ...which probably has the gruesome sort of interface that makes dealing with a large media collection more trouble than it needs to be.
"the vast majority of formats" is probably in truth not much really.
Consider the likelihood that people willing to "waste money on expensive options" probably have direct experience with any "cheaper option" you care to name.
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I used to do what you do. I have a NAS and a HTPC; no more scratched DVDs to worry about, no more battling with the DVD drive; all files are put in simple folders and ready to rock and roll within seconds.
If I know I have a movie, locating it on the harddrive is a matter of opening "movies" catalog and find it by alphabetical order. Locating it on my DVD rack can take ages, since they are never in order and some have been lent out and never returned - and even when you manage to figure out where you put it,
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wha? it's just a list of files. How hard is that to organize?
Personally, I;m still looking for a good tool that lets me copy the DVD as a whole, and then allow me to turn dubbing and/or subtitles. Avi doesn't work for that.
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If I may ask, what is the point of having everything networked so you can stream videos? I don't really see the advantage over what I do (which is 1) rip/download 2) burn to DVD in .avi format 3) erase the file off the server. ) My way I have a clean, simple DVD catalogue to flip though, where if I have everything on the network I have to navigate through file systems, looking all over hell's half acre for a movie I might have.
I don't understand the "have to navigate through file systems" comment. I'm using a Tivo, but it could just as well be a DLNA-aware TV or other device. There are free programs (I'm using streambaby) that will take whatever media files you've put in an arbitrary directory (or group of directories) and make them available from a menu on your TV. No searching through folders, it's just a matter of looking through an alphabetically-organized list of movies and TV shows.
Of course the way you choose to do it and
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"If I may ask, what is the point of having everything networked so you can stream videos?"
Many people have more than 1 TV. I have a living room tv, a bedroom tv and the game room tv and finally the theater that has a 102" screen. instead of causing problems and having to copy movies to 4 places I put them on a NAS. works great. and with XBMC, If I stop a movie in the theater, I can go to the bedroom and resume it where I left off as it remembers where I left off. but then I built a media server not a
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1) rip/download 2) burn to DVD in .avi format 3) erase the file off the server.
4) end up with ~235 DVDs for just 1TB.
When I recorded 200 DVDs, I realized that they take too much space and effort (recording, labeling, cataloging every disc) and switched to tapes. The basic procedure is the same, but as one tape holds 100GB (200GB after upgrade), I need to do it less often (instead of swapping ~40 discs every 10 minutes, I just start the process and can do something else while the file server writes and verifies the tape in ~4 hours), and hopefully tapes will last longer than DVDs, as 6
Utility software to the rescue... (Score:4, Funny)
I've dug through my old floppies for a program a former employer of mine, PC-Kwik, made, but never released that allows swapping an almost unlimited number of floppies in and out in place of more hard drive space... That should hold off the hard drive crunch, for me, for at least an hour or two...
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An hour or two? What are you on? Dialup?
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I've dug through my old floppies for a program a former employer of mine, PC-Kwik, made, but never released that allows swapping an almost unlimited number of floppies in and out in place of more hard drive space... That should hold off the hard drive crunch, for me, for at least an hour or two...
damn - and I just threw out a whole case of floppies - still have some 8" though - do you need some?
SSDs (Score:2)
I've already switched to SSDs for everything but "big bulk network accessible media storage".
They're just too cheap, for the sizes I need. My mythtv frontends only use two or three gigs, my desktops only use a couple gigs. Gaming PC needs a large rotating media, but thats about it, and by the time it fries, SSDs will be big enough and cheap enough for that too.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I remember that, during the beige era, there was SCSI HDs which were simply rejected by the OS (you could not use those at all, AFAIR the OS reported those as "unsupported"), and the fix was to run a 3rd-party software which enabled those.
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Actually there is. TRIM is a pain to implement because you have to modify the file system to work with it. Even in the Linux world you have to use a fairly recent kernel with ext4 and a custom mount option even to turn TRIM on. In order to add support for it, you may have to make a new version of the file system and that in turn means losing backward compatibility with previous OS versions.
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Geeze guys this sounds slightly overcomplicated for what I've been doing for a few years now. I just yank out they dead/dying/too small hard drive, install a SSD and whatever 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch adapter gear I need, and notice my bonnie++ results for random access just went up to previously unimaginable numbers (most of infrastructure runs linux, although I do have two macs which stubbornly haven't required replacement yet). Since the old system must have met its requirements or I would have fixed it in
No decision (Score:2)
I was going to vote "decided to make do" but then I realized I didn't make any decision at all as a result of the HDD pricing news since I have 4TB of drive space and no desire to expand any time soon.
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He said 4TB of free space.
I have less than that, yet won't be buying any new drives anytime soon. this with about 10 TB on-line and another 8TB of offline disk storage.
-nB
I am screwed (Score:3)
I wonder if I could throw a couple of SATA SSD drives in there instead.
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yes IIRC you can do this, however throughput wll be 1/2 of the SAS speed and overall transfer rate will suck as well, but it should keep you up and running. Or you could buy SAS SSDs, not cheap, but should give you all the performance you want.
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...
WTF are you smoking? Almost ANY SSD will smoke pretty much EVERY spinning disk of the same form factor. You really have to get a shitty SSD for that not to be the case.
Either way, at now point is the SATA or SAS channel the bottleneck. The fact that you think it is shows you really have no idea how these systems work.
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Or you don't know RAID controllers of which many are SAS 6G/SATA 3G. So when it detects a SATA SSD even if it supports SATA 6G you run at half speed.
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SAS drives are all about platters. A large one will smoke SSDs. There are a lot of reasons for this, and if you don't know them, look them up.
For Home use, yes SSDs are the way to go, but when you have 50TB? no.
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If the need is that significant, why did you not have spares, or good warranty support? Mission-critical systems should be supported in a way that absolutely minimizes downtime, and if your drive failure plan consists of ordering drives from somewhere, then it either isn't mission-critical, or you did not actually have a plan.
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The Cloud! (Score:2)
Make it someone else's problem. After all, that's the whole point of the cloud, right?
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Pornographic Memory (Score:3)
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I don't need hard drives, I've developed a pornographic memory!
Yes, because we know that's all hard drives are used to store these days anyway. A hard drive crunch just means a little less porn storage space. Time to fall-back to the old-school: magazines under the bed.
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I don't need hard drives, I've developed a pornographic memory!
Yes, because we know that's all hard drives are used to store these days anyway. A hard drive crunch just means a little less porn storage space. Time to fall-back to the old-school: magazines under the bed.
I say meet in the middle and store DVDs under the bed. Not only do they take up less space physically but you can fit scans of every magazine you'd ever care to read on one.
Moving back down the size line (Score:2)
Something else (Score:2)
I've not changed my behaviour at all, and not decided anything.
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Same here. Haven't given it much thought. I've thought about buying one of those portable USB HDs, say 1TB, but it's not high on my list of priorities.
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Indeed. This is the first I've heard of a price squeeze.
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Have no plans to make changes because of the (rumors of an) impending shortage.
Steady as she goes, Mr Sulu
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I'd notice that the poll question "In light of the squeeze in hard drive prices ..." certainly reads to me like "oh noes, hard drives are getting expensive, you should buy one right now", which is not the correct conclusion.
Especially since I've not come close to running out of space - what I do with my personal machines (software development, writing, communication with the outside world, and a little bit of gaming) doesn't involve huge quantities of data.
Cut bank and... (Score:2)
No worries (Score:2)
I'll just use a million monkeys and give them hammers and chisels to carve my data onto granite slabs.
Doi (Score:2)
- I have no need for more drives in the immediate future.
- I accept the price rise and will buy drives as needed.
Before the prices all rise? (Score:2)
Eh? They've already soared - 1TB hard disks were about £50, they're more like £100 now.
whats the big deal? (Score:2)
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I will do nothing.
Or rather I will replace drives as they need to be replaced on the schedule I have already determined without considering this distortion in prices.
Fortunately, I just bought replacements for my most "needy" drives. They were due.
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what's the big deal, Hard Drives are dirt cheap, even with the potential 50% price rise they will still be so cheap as to be irrelevant when it comes to deciding what storage to put in my machines and when to buy it.
A respectable rule of thumb is the electricity to run an old fashioned rotating drive 24x365 for five years (a long lifetime) costs about $100. So if the capital cost of the drive goes from $50 to $100, don't panic that the total cost of ownership has doubled, its only gone from $150 to $200 or "about a third more"
Another respectable rule of thumb is at current prices, the cost of the rest of the infrastructure for the bare drives swamps the cost of the drives until you get over 10 TB or so. Below 10 TB d
My new HDD arrived a few days ago (Score:2)
Now I won't need one for another 3 years.
Just got a bunch of new ones... (Score:2)
The company a friend works for just dumped a bunch of 1 TB 5400 RPM drives. He gave me six of them. I'm set. (Now if only my server machine that has a six drive bay wasn't such a power hog and so insanely noisy...)
I've decided to squeeze my hard ... (Score:3)
I guess I'll have to cut back on downloading pr0n.
Holographic crystals (Score:2)
Switched to that a few years ago so why do i care about a 'hard drive' with all those pesky moving parts ( and such a low storage ability )?
And no, you cant have one yet, its research material that is still highly classified on how it works.
Terabyte laptop (Score:2)
I've been on the fence about putting a terabyte drive in my laptop, the impending price rise pushed me over the edge. Now I'll finally have room for the 496 Gigabytes of photos I've taken since 1997... this should hold me for about a year or up to the time I get a new d-SLR with video capability.
So far I've managed to load the photos up through mid-2001.... and it's only going to get slower from here on as the cameras got better and higher resolution.
I am hoarding.... (Score:2)
I am hoarding the stack of HDDs we recently replaced with SSDs, to sell when supply starts to dry up.
Just business as usual (Score:2)
I ordered a new hard drive because I needed more space. Potential price increases had nothing to do with it.
I should be fine. (Score:2)
I have a 1 year old 2TB drive, a 1TB drive, and two 500GB drives, all SATA. I also have a 750GB external drive. The external isn't as handy as it used to be, only for the fact that my current case has a SATA dock built into the top, and my system supports hot-swapping of hard drives. Unless I need to be sure I can access files on another machine, I can just plug in one of the spare drives as needed.
What squeeze? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where's the option for those who are ignorant of the "problem"?
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This - I buy disks when I need them, not when there's a price rise. I bought 6 hard drives recently, perhaps before that rise, maybe after the squeeze, and I'm going to buy more soon. What does the price rise have anything to do with my needs?
Re:What squeeze? (Score:4, Informative)
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Making do with what I have. (Score:2)
I was planing on upgrading my two internal HDs, which total in capacity at ~300GB.
Was going to buy a 30GB SSD and a 2TB HD. But I can wait this out. It was more of a convenience for me, so I don't have to push things out to the NAS quite so often.
Maybe drive storage isn't fungible?
Why would I need hard drives? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm probably the exception rather than the rule here... but why the hell would I need new hard drives? At some point one may fail, but I assure you I'm not about to run out and stockpile them in case it does. Most of my work and play these days is taking place on my iPad anyways.
I have at least 250GB of (personally owned) cloud storage, and 500GB in my laptop with an additional 500GB for backup. I'm probably using half of that.
Now that I'm thinking about it, the only real data hogs I have are the virtual ma
Waiting for next storage leap (Score:2)
I have 10 terabytes of storage. 90% full. (that's 6x2T hdd, where 2 marketing T != 2 real T)
I have enough work sorting that much data out for now, I'll up it when the next paradigm comes along.
Changed my mind (Score:2)
Yeeeehaaa! (Score:2)
Paper Tape is making a comeback!
They never believed me... (Score:2)
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The shop where I buy my parts from called me and warned me that they are having trouble getting hard drives (even Seagate) because their suppliers are playing games. One of them showed 16 WD Caviar Black drives in stock, but when he called they said that they were reserved. He offered to buy all 16 of them in case that was their game, but was still refused. Another of his suppliers invented a condition that you have to get other hardware with the purchase of a hard drive. Another raised prices to the point
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Ditto, shop where I usually get parts told me the same, although he usually has stock for new system builds anyway. The problem is when his current stock runs out, it runs out.
He also told me prices have been going up 30% daily since last Wednesday. One of his suppliers is even enforcing a "you must buy hard drives with other hardware" scam and limiting it to 2-5 per day.
I actually upgraded in 2008 to a large raid array, so I have probably 10-15 drives (smallest being 200 GB, largest 500 GB) in both IDE and
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"He also told me prices have been going up 30% daily since last Wednesday. "
So hard drives are currently 330% higher in price than they were last tuesday. I think you need to find a more honest supplier. Newegg is not showing such price inflation.
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"He also told me prices have been going up 30% daily since last Wednesday."
At a glance Newegg is showing a total of 30% in my sample case, but nothing like a "daily" increase that far back. On 6/20/2011 I ordered a 2TB RE4 for $229. The price on the site today for the 2TB RE4 is $299 limit 1. Maybe WDC is being hit harder than others, but a $70 price increase means it is now 130% of the previous price. So a 30% total increase at this point sounds accurate anyway.
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This reminds me of the RAM shortages in the early '90s, when you couldn't buy standard RAM sizes for love nor money. I did purchasing for a small specialist Apple reseller at the time and had all the local (Australian) RAM distributors on speed dial and was ordering twice a week on average.
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My explanation:
I have 80% more storage than I need already you insensitive clod.
Plan ahead, never buy on the upswing, this is the first time by the way that it every worked for me. Stocks: Sell Low, Buy High! etc.
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If we told you, you'd be doing it too and the price of our substitute would increase.
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"on the grounds of apparent prescience..."
Yeah, a lot of my own best predictions are about the past.
My hindsight's always 20/20 ;)
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"Or do you prefer to visually evaluate feminine posteriors?"
I think a goodly portion of males above a certain age would be guilty of that one. Else putting advertising logos on the seats of women's shorts never would have caught on.
One of the nice things about working on a college campus is the scenery.
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I use a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Cowboy Neals.
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Meh, whenever you need more disk space, simply delete some pr0n.
Of course, that means you have to review it first to make sure you're not losing anything of value.
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Exactly. My 32GB SSD isn't even full. I used to need a lot of space to hold my music, but now I just use Spotify. Streaming ftw!
Of course the computer I've just ordered has a 64GB SSD and I think it was a 1.5TB HDD, so I definitely will not be feeling any squeeze for a while even if I get seriously back into PC gaming. If I get back into something where my data is valuable I'll need to buy something for backups, but then I'll just buy it. An extra few pounds over what prices were a few months ago is insigni
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Don't forget to use a parity pigeon, though I believe parrots are more popular for that purpose.
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Reduce, reuse, recycle.
I agree. Now that the shortage has hit, I can pull from my mothballed drive collection.
[blows dust off drive] Now where is the ST-506 connector on this Sandy Bridge mainboard?
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The factory could have recycled a large amount of the drive directly, and more than likely would have recycled nearly 100% of it by selling the non-recyclable bits to someone who could recycle it or use it directly somewhere else.
Instead, they are now in some landfill instead, because you have some silly idea that someone actually cares enough about your porn to dig your disks out of the garbage, do data recovery on them by some awesome super secret lab that doesn't actually exist anywhere outside of a movi
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You speak as if a child owned the drives. I
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What good is an old hard drive once the capacities of portable storage exceeds it? I just pulled apart an old 10GB HDD for the magnets, because even though it worked fine it would never be worth the effort to hook it up when I can just use an SD card. I'm still using an 80GB drive for part of my backups, but I don't think it's going to last more than a couple more years.
Re:And they laughed at me... (Score:5, Informative)
Now how many floppies in a TB? ;)
At 1.44 MB, about 728,178. Not counting write errors, of course. But how many is that really? By some quick calculations, that is close to 10 standard 48x40 shipping pallets stacked 70 inches high.
That's all.
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<pedantic>
HD manufacturers use those weird metric units [1] that are inappropriate for computing. My 1TB WD drive has a capacity of 1,000,204,886,016 bytes, or about 954 real MB.
Next, A PC floppy isn't 1.44MB. It's 1440KB.
That works out to a common 1TB drive being equal to about 678,307 floppies.
</pedantic>
[1] If you've ever said "mebibyte" in earnest, DIAF. I'll quit the field before I willingly sound like Mushmouth in front of my peers.
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all with at least 2-year-warranty.
Yea, because ISPs who do hosting aren't smart enough to have maintenance contracts and reserves to deal with exactly these sorts of issues, of course and none of the drives in the data center are covered by warranties either.
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Yup. All this panic, the manufacturers, distributors and resellers making a killing off the rubes. If I need to, I'll buy replacements, though a good many of my drives are still under warranty. But I'm not going to play this "ZOMG! Tomorrow they might be 25% higher than yesterday!!! I better buy 12!"
Yeah... (Score:2)
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I play lots of video games. Dragon Age Origins ultimate edition takes up nearly 25 gigs. The new Deus Ex, nearly 10. Add in other games, Mass Effect series, an MMO or two, and you can easily fill a small drive with just Windows and your games of choice. Most of the space on my external drives is taken up by pictures. It's amazing how quick a camera can fill up a few gigs when you shoot at 8megapixels or above. Want to shoot a video longer than a few minutes? Going to need a few gigs of storage if you ever w