New WD 4 TB Desktop Network Storage System

[Michael Pancier]

Read it here.

Less than $1K for the 4TB and you can use it with three computers and remote.

This is what I may need to get rid of the 8 HD's which are all over my desk :-p

[Rocky Sharwell]

I wonder about the speed of the unit. I used a Buffalo Terrastation a few years ago. It worked well but seemed slow--but from what I read at the time that was common to networked storage.

[john crookes]

Here is western digitals site with all the specs and such

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro...sp?driveid=501

[Ed Cordes]

In a way it sounds good. However, in another way it seems scary to put so much data on a single drive without having another one for back up redundancy.

[Roger Clark]

$1K seems high. I've bought 1 TB seagate and hitachi USB drives for as little as $179 per drive.

However, as a raid 5 system, that is a great price.

Note that the disk drive growth curve is quite impressive. Projecting it forward we will see 8 to 10 terabyte drives by 2012. 2-TB drives will probably come out next year. Terabyte laptop drives are not far off.

If you do decide to go with a 4 TB raid 5 system, don't rely on it alone as even raid 5 systems can die losing the entire array. At work I have over 50 terabytes of raid 5 systems. The only losses we've had in about 7 years of running them are complete losses of a raid system. Example: on a Friday night, a fan failed and the drives cooked all weekend. They were flaky ever since and we had to replace the entire array of 7 drives. We had the array backed up to another array in a different building. The lesson: back up your images to multiple drives (and/or media, like DVD or blu-ray, and store at least one set off site. We now use arrays with redundant power supplies and fans.

So, if you buy a raid array, buy two (at least) one to back up the main array.

Roger

[Roger Clark]

I see in this morning's paper, a Best Buy advertisement for Seagate 1.5 TByte USB (3.5 inch) drives for $229, and 500 GByte Seagate USB 2.5-inch drives for $189.

On a different but related front, flash memory continues to evolve. I saw this week predictions on "commercial" grade flash memory reaching 128 GBytes for $200 in 2010. Commercial grade, I think, is equivalent to what the high end fast compact flash cards use. Then dropping to under $1/Gbyte a year or so later. Just think: Sandisk 32 GB Extreme IV cards for less than $32 (and we will think that is small and slow).

So now it looks hopeful that we can store all those 21+ megapixel images and the HD video our cameras will take. ;-)

Roger