Forget the external disk foreveer!!

[Samakimoto Graphics]

Some geek news.

Check out the link below:

http://drobo.com/

[Sphinx]

A bit pricey....

[SpugNothuson]

Right, so its an external box that runs up to 4 SATA Hardrives at the same time. So it's 4 external drives connected to each other. Just one wire to the computer. Which is USB, not Firewire, or even SATA itself.

Transfer rate would be tosh.

There has to be a better solution than this out there. I could build a server system with 4 SATA and RAID capabilities to store my files for less than $499. Am I missing something?

[Drazan]

technically this is just an external harddrive unit that can hold muliple drives. No different than the current 1T external harddrive units, which usually have 2 drives.

For a little bit more money you can get a rack mount 1T file server from LaCie. Which comes with 10/100/1000 network capabilites - depending on the model.

Drobo has a niche, but it's not anything new.

[nyc_skater]

For a little bit more money you can get a rack mount 1T file server from LaCie. Which comes with 10/100/1000 network capabilites - depending on the model.

ooo ooo we had one of those lacie 1T rack mounted units where i used to be...that was so much fun...fast as all get out too!!

[D-Frag]

nah your not missing anything spug, i got a terabyte at home, 4 drives, costs me under $500 for it. this thing is just a fancy box with im sure some third party backup software.

[Kool]

A little off topic but what the heck is up with how they can "rate" a hard drive for lack of a better word. My last PC was advertised as having a 200 gig hard drive, except it was actually 181 gigs. I later bought a "180" gig external HD and it only had 162 gigs. The a few week ago I bought a "500" gig external HD and it only had 465. Where the pancake is my other 35 gigs. I could store a lot of porn in 35 gigs dang it!

[Silence04]

a couple of these with Raid 6 would put that to shame:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Compaq-StorageWorks-4354R-Array-EK1502-14x-36gb-15k_W0QQitemZ110150079331QQihZ001QQcategoryZ64070Q QrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

[Drazan]

formatting the drive takes a lot of space. unfortunately. Formatting takes the total drive and allocates sections on it so that when writing on the drive it can skip around if need be. Else we would be waiting forever to linear write anything to disk.

Ever get a "bad sector" error? basically its when the "formatting database" (for lack of a better term) is corrupted or it detects that the drive is actually damaged.

The actual file "knows" where all its data is through the crc method. Which checks the available bits by the total bits. If you get the crc error, it means that some of the bits didn't transfer over correctly.

Typically you loose approximately 10% of drive space due to formatting.

Also note that when you get a fresh drive, you should automatically format it first. This allows for less liability in crashing due to format errors from the factory - not to mention the Fat32 to NTSC fault that some drives have.

<< is way too geeky - first "hard drive" was a magnetic tape cassette. ;)

Jade

[Kool]

Cool, I didn't know about the formatting stuff, makes sense though. I didn't get into computers quite as early as you Draz, my first PC hard drive was a measly 207 megs and a whopping 2 megs of ram. I remember getting my first 1 gig HD, I thought that was all the room in the world LOL.

[Drazan]

My first computer was a little black box & key board that was hooked into a b&w TV set. We had a special cassette recorder for "saving" data. That was 1983-84 or somewhere around there. I was only 11 or 12 at the time. I had no choice but to learn how to code BASIC. There was no "load program" I had to type out everything I wanted to do.

Also around that time the school had an Apple computer that I also had free use of. So I learned how to save and load and go to and run.

Fast forward a couple years, I'm in high school 10th grade computer science. Everyone else is learning how to "open" "save" etc, meanwhile - I'm quite board with it all since I've all ready been doing this for a couple years. So while the teacher is talking I flip to the back of the book which has a fractual program, cool! But it is written in IBM language not Apple basic. So I look it over and convert it to Apple, it's about 3 pages of code, then I type "run". .... The entire class stopped and looked at me. The teacher just stared and asked how I did that. I showed him the IBM code and explained how I translated it to Apple. He said, "That's not possible!".

Needless to say - I got an "A" and proceeded to do whatever I wanted in the computer lab. :)

<<< walks down memory lane