1 TB hdd form Hitachi (bless you! ;-) in Q1 2007

[jo-1]

it's been quite silent for a while but now finally Hitachi is the first to announce a 399 EUR 1TB harddisc in 3,5 inch.

The new "monster" is called 7k1000 and it has 9 W power consuption @ approx. 30 % faster than it's predecessor 7k500 (impressive dirve in Raid 0 arrays)

Can't wait to get two of them for my image storage - if the performance data is correct - the 7k1000 shoulld end up at some 80 till 100 MB/secin single mode and some 150 till 180 MB/sec for double Raid 0 configuration compare to some 100 till 140 MB/sec for the 7k500 pair in my Quad Core MAC

here's the link: http://www.hgst.com

[jo-1]

finally the 1 TB monster is ready for us endusers

I've ordered 4 of these monsters for my Quad Core Mac G5 (two for internal use in a Raid 0 array and 2 for a RAID 0 array externally for backup purposes)

Confirmed delivery date is 7th of May (press your thumbs that my preferred "box shifter" is on time)

Several tests have been issued throughout the last weeks and the amazing data of the 7k1000 have been confirmed. Data throughput >> 80 MB/sec and noise less than the previous 7k500 drive.

I will post my first experiences here as soon as my Raid 0 is up and running.

Furthermore I read a very nice article about future hdd sizes. the article claims a 50 TB drive in 2013 to 2015 - so all debates about the right storage media could be obsolete soon. All current media only have to last form now on another five or six years. This is excellent news IMHO

So forget about all futher media and concentrate on the things that make live interesting => take your pictures



vbr <=> jo-1

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130598/article.html

[lnbolch]

Some thoughts.

You might consider using all four in a Level 5 RAID array. You lose about 25% of the storage for parity files, but the result is a very fast array that is remarkably fault-tolerant. I recently had one drive fail, and the array reconstructed the data across the remaining three. When the fourth drive was reactivated, it once again reconstructed the data across all four. Not a single bit was lost.

Level 0 is wonderfully fast. I have three drives in a Level 0 on this machine, and can play my animations in full resolution from uncompressed files! However, one must realize that Level 0 is as treacherous as Level 5 is fault tolerant. One must be obsessive about backup, since someday you will lose it all. All hard drives fail eventually, and when you have multiples, the chances of catastrophic failure are compounded.

A RAID can be partitioned just as if it were a single drive, so if you want a system drive and a data drive, that should present no problems. You may have the ideal set-up now for your situation, but if not, consider the alternatives. Fault tolerance is certainly something to help one sleep at night.

[jo-1]

Some thoughts.

You might consider using all four in a Level 5 RAID array.

That was my first thought but there are some boundary conditions.

1.) Money => buying 6 or 8 1 TB drives is even more exhausting than my 4
2.) I do not have the space in my Quad Core MAC to install > 2 drives (the water cooling system consumes some space)
3.) 2 TB are fine for the moment - I assume that within a period of some 2 years the 2 or 3 TB level will be reached and then it's time to copy to the next level.

2 internally combind drives with Level 0 und two externally in Raid 0 will do my job the most efficient way for two years - I prefere the backup version.

BTW the Raid 5 caseings are very expensive -- a Raid 0 for two Sata drives is in direct comparisson a bargin.
I use two of theses Taurus Casings with FW800 connection (don't they look great?)


I will use my two old 500 GB drives (in Raid 0 modes actually installed tith totally 1 TB) in one cassing and two new 1 TB in the 2nd casing and install the two remaining new 1 TB drives in my Quad Core. That gives me in total 5 TB with two levels of backup and it's much cheaper than any Raid 5 I've seen so far with the same capacity. The only backdraw is surely speed - a Raid 5 with 4 discs would run faster than my two in Raid 0 but I simply do not want to install further drives with a kind of "Siemens Lufthaken" in my work station. Here's a picture of that:

I am too frightend that the cooling conditions are bad. The two drives in my Quad G5 are cooled with a special ventilation - the risk of over heating will be lowered.

BTW which SATA disks do you use in your RAID5??

Last point is surely the energy consuption. Two disks consume less energy than 4 of them and the incremental baykup every day only takes some minutes of uptime for the backup drives. For most jobs the expected 150 MB/sec (average write and read speed) of two 7k1000 should be more than enough . hopefully

[bez]

One thing that worries me about permanent storage on very large drives (similarly CD v DVD but on a much smaller scale) is what happens when the drive or disc fails?
Although I suppose with oodles of space one simply backs up the back up, ad infinitum ...

Also not sure if the term RAID strictly applies to a drive costing 400 euros

[DavidW]

If you want scary money, start looking at the prices of 15krpm U320 SCSI or SAS drives - then you can faint! These things are often RAIDed as well - guess inexpensive must be a relative term.



David

[gcrogers]

I've recently started to see "RAID" defined here and there as "redundant array of 'independent' drives".

[bez]

Hmm - what constitutes 'independent' - different power supply or case, other building or mains grid, different country, or planet?

[gcrogers]

Bez, Ha!

But seriously, in my experience, when a drive goes bad, it's the disk-controller that usually fails before the drive itself. I've often wondered if each independent (or inexpensive, take your choice) drive in a RAID array has it's own, unique controller? Maybe somebody here can straighten me out on that?

-Greg

[DavidW]

High end RAID, which is the stuff I'm most familiar with, uses a controller card that contains its own processor, RAM, ideally a battery backup (so that you can use write caching safely - the battery backs up the RAM on the RAID card so that the RAID system can safely tell the OS that it's written the data and if the data remains unwritten at power down, it will be written when the power returns) and the necessary gubbins to control the disks.

It's not necessarily one controller per disk - U320 SCSI RAID cards typically have somewhere between 0 (use the SCSI controller on the motherboard) and 4 SCSI buses, each of which can happily take four drives.

The recent move to SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA means one controller per drive - except that the really high end systems use expanders which breaks the 'one controller per drive' setup. Of course, you can get many controllers on one chip anyway.

The host interface is often PCI-Express or PCI-X, though you can get RAID systems that have SCSI interfaces, which you hook up to one or more SCSI cards (the problem is that these external RAID systems can be so fast they need multiple SCSI channels).

Most RAID based servers built today typically contain a PCI-X RAID card hooked up to a drive backplane in the server's chassis, which is a bunch of hot swap drives.


SAS is really neat, because it uses the same connectors as SATA. You can use SATA devices on an SAS controller - but not the other way round. SAS devices must be used on an SAS controller. This means you can manage several arrays with a single SAS RAID controller, such as a high speed RAID 1 with a couple of 15krpm SAS drives and a large, lower speed RAID 6 with a bunch of 7200rpm SATA drives running off the same controller.

The RAID controller is indeed often the point of failure (it is a single point of failure - something many people that advocate relatively inexpensive RAID setups often seem to overlook - along with the fact that RAID 1 only contains a single filesystem) - I've known several servers downed by RAID controller failure. To keep you on your toes, drive arrays can often only be plugged into a RAID controller of the same vendor if you want your data back - there's no standard on disk format between vendors.

Take a look here for a high end SAS RAID card (the battery backup option is available, but not shown in that datasheet - in fact, there's two different battery backup systems available).



David

[gcrogers]

Thanks for the detailed explanation, David. I feel better now because my external server-type RAID device is SATA...but until now I'm ashamed to admit I didn't understand much about it. You might have meant to link to somewhere and forgot, BTW?

Again, thanks!
-Greg

[Dierk]

what happens when the drive or disc fails?

In probability terms [well, not quite the technical terms but ...], fewer larger drives are less prone to possible data loss than many small drives. The probabilities of failure add up, that is, the more drives/cards you have the more probalbe it is you kose data due to hardware failure.

The flipside is that you [may] lose more with just one medium; probabilities do not tell us anything about individual events.

[jo-1]

what happens when the drive or disc fails?

In probability terms [well, not quite the technical terms but ...], fewer larger drives are less prone to possible data loss than many small drives. The probabilities of failure add up, that is, the more drives/cards you have the more probalbe it is you kose data due to hardware failure.

The flipside is that you [may] lose more with just one medium; probabilities do not tell us anything about individual events.

that's whay a multilevel approach is the best assurance to keep your precious data.

My "upgrade-path" includes already a Raid 5 configuration in 1 or two years when 1,5 TB drives are available and my actual 4x 1 TB drives are outmoded - by then the Raid 5 (4 Disc) casings with independent controller are available for a bargin

Storage is all abot "clever" upgrading and migration to the next storage level.

In the püast I had several harddisc problems with state of the art models.
Now I simply exchange the main drives every two years. This turned out to be the most reliable way to keep the data.

My Fujitsu 4 GB drives in 1998 failed within the waranty but I did not get any replacement though I insisted. So my learning is this: Never trust the manufacturers - simply replace the most used drives every now and then - turning on and too much heat affect the possible lifetime of a drive.

In other words - go for the biggest and best in class and replace it before you loose data.

A "used" drive still can work as a backup drive with less utilization. If you happen t have many of them - go for a multi upgrade and store these drives in different locations.

I always have additionally an optical backup with a one or two year granularity. YES - its pricy and YES it takes time and space but YES - i feel much better now.

The big central working machine needs the biggest attention since a lot of wark was invested (at least in my case) - the laptop is simply a mobile subset of the master data.

Hopefully Adobe is including the sync tool in Lightroom before I purchase a DSLR so I simply can dock the laptop after pre-aquisition of the images. By now 2 x 1 TB is roughly the data I need for images but the roadmap for storage will satisfy my needs by 2012 or so with >> 5 TB / 3,5 inch drive.

A clever backup strategy is really neccessary when a certain time has been invested in the data. Lightroom is one of the reasons why the switch to digital media is now (at least from my side) the first time a benefit and no step back.

LIGHTROOM is THE killer app. for sorting and ranking of images - iTunes for images on a professional level (whilest iPhoto and Picasa are simply underfeatured, slow and with a strange GUI)

Backup is the most important topic for any photograher! (after simply doing the images

[Dierk]

LIGHTROOM is THE killer app. for sorting and ranking of images

No. MediaPro [soon: Expression Media] is much better. LR is a good application if someone new to the game needs an almost-all-in-one program to ingest, sort, rank, flag, optimise, publish photos. It does all of that, some parts below mediocre, some middling, some a little better, but nothing really well. No wonder, it is not a dedicated one purpose appliance, it's a multi-tool*.



*I leave it to your national loyalties to put in Leatherman, Victorinox/Swiss Army Knife, Gerber etc.

[jo-1]

. . . No. MediaPro [soon: Expression Media] is much better . . .

just had a quick view

It becomes obvious that you're not a MAC user.

Almost all additional features that Media Pro is doing (on top of LR) are part of the Mac OS 10.4.x operating system by default (after a quick look). Why should anybody spend additional money for that?

I see where you're coming from but I don't get the point why purchasing such a rudimentary and proprietary data base tool when I can get a dedicated photo workflow tool and rely on an attractive operating sysetm that does the rest

(my hard discs are still not deliverd )

jo-1