I guess the HDD makers are trying to keep people buying their drives as the SSD drives are getting cheaper and they will be LARGER than 1tb VERY soon, add to that, the PCI Express drives @ 10gbps and are more than likely going to get FASTER. :)
A friend of mine already has his eyes on the 8TB Seagate put out for his adult education material.
Giant SSDs are well out of my price range.I can't even justify the cost of a 250 GB SSD.
I can get a 3 TB HDD for less.
My laptop has a 480 GB SSD in it.
I'd only rate it as OK.
I never take the laptop anywhere, so the SSD's weight and power advantage don't get a chance to impress me.
Since I use as a media centre, it doesn't do anything that would show off it's speed.
If I had it in my desktop, I'm sure I'd notice a difference.
Sure! You buyin'?
All seriousness aside, the best solution, currently, is to use a smaller (thus, less expensive) SSD for the OS and programs and the more affordable HDDs for storing large amounts of data. Unless continuously transferring enormous amounts of data, there is no noticeable speed difference between a SSD and a 7200rpm HDD; the only advantages to using a SSD instead of a HDD for data storage is reduce power consumption and, possibly, better reliability and life. However, SSDs still aren't cost effective enough for storage primetime.
If data doesn't exist in at least three places (source and two backups), then it isn't safe. The capacity of drives data is kept on and backed up on is immaterial as long as one has proper backups. Splitting up data onto multiple drives only means if one drive should fail, only a portion of your data gets lost. Keeping all your data on one drive and duplicating it on other drives means, if the one drive should fail, you will still have ALL of your data on another drive.
Having ones data one large drive takes up far less physical space and weight than having it spread over several smaller drives. Having that data on a single drive means having fewer backup drives which will, again, take up less physical space and weight and cut down on the amount of handling one has to do.
Hi there
Great idea - nothing wrong with these for masses amount of data - however as the HDD sizes increase so does the resulting disaster become if it fails - and the bigger the HDD the bigger amount of backup you'll need.
I'd imagine these will become very popular though on SERVERS where you can attach shedloads of HDD's.
With todays technology I think I'd rather have 4X 2.5GB HDD's where using RAID or some sort of mirroring I would have protection in the case of HDD failure - but I'm not against the idea of large HDD's.
regarding SSD's - I think the sweetspot is already here - 256GB - plenty for the OS and some paging / scratch / temporary storage area.
You don't need mega fast SSD's for playing music, watching video, surfing the net, downloading from torrents, doing email or most office type stuff.
For Photoshop scratch areas, data base queries, running the OS etc an SSD is perfect - until prices come down to equate to HDD's it's not worth putting most types of data on to an SSD (yet).
Longevity wise -- SSD's seem now just as robust as their HDD counterparts - but until they are tested in heavy Disk usage environments such as busy servers we can't yet tell. For domestic computers though no problems here.
Cheers
jimbo
We crossposted. :)
I still fail to see the problem here. If you have, say, 4TB of data spread over, say, four 1TB HDDs, then, to ensure the safety of that data, you would to have eight 1TB HDDs to safely back up that data (keep in mind that even backup HDDs can fail so two backups are much safer than just one). You could also keep a backup for four 1TB HDDs on a single 4TB drive but you would still have four times the bulk in original drives. As long as you have data backed up properly, there will be no disaster if a source HDD should fail, no matter its size.
True that. Large commercial servers are the initial target customers for these newest monster HDDs.
All RAID can do is allow you to keep operating should one of the HDDs fail (something that is merely a convenience rather than a necessity for most people other than businesses). However, drive failure is not the only thing that can cause data failure. RAID will not protect you from data loss due to malware, user error, hardware failure (such as a blown PSU frying all your HDDs), natural disasters, theft, etc.
No arguments there.
Last edited by Lady Fitzgerald; 12 Sep 2014 at 06:20. Reason: Hit wrong button (stupid old age).
Hi there
You don't actually need 4 TB ONLINE to be able to backup 4TB's worth of data -- this can be backed up incrementally / gradually etc etc.
Agreed though you need 4TB in total to completely back up 4TB's worth of data (probably more as I certainly wouldn't rely on only ONE backup). This can be spread over loads of smaller HDD's of course.
Raid of course allows your system to keep working in the event of HDD failure. While this might not be so important if you have a lot of smaller HDD's - relying on one mega large HDD will certainly cause a headache.
Baring in mind though that however large an HDD is - it's NEVER enough -- who was it at IBM or ms saying we'd never need a 20 MB (yes Mega byte) HDD.
Knowing on these forums how few people ever backup their data or even their OS - expect to get a lot more panic requests if these large HDD's go on to consumers at affordable prices -- data recovery companies are in for a windfall.
Cheers
jimbo
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