Hitachi recently started to ship in US their 4 Terrabyte drive. My first ever computer hard disk was 5 megabytes. Yes, *mega* bytes. Not Gigabytes. That was 30 years ago. So in that time, the capacity has increased nearly a million times!
The 4 TByte drive from Hitach retails for $300 to $350. I don't remember what I paid for my 4 MegByte drive but I think it was more than this. That IBM drive failed a year later. Ironically, IBM sold its hard disk business to Hitachi. In turn, Western Digital is buying Hitachi hard disk business.
If you are just dealing with audio, 4 Tbyte drive is not of much value to you. But for video, it is a godsend. To put things in context, a full Blu-ray disc uses 0.05 TBytes of space. So every 20 takes 1 Tbyte. A 4 Tbyte drive therefore can hold 80 discs. So as you see, in that context, this is not that big of a drive.
What is nice about a 4 Tbyte drive is that you need fewer of them to build a server to hold your library. It is relatively easy to stuff 8 or 10 drives in a system. Going to 20 or 30 is much harder in the form of needing for drive interfaces, and large enough case to hold them all. When I started to think about building my server, the largest drive was 1 Tbytes and 1.5 Tbyte drivers were just being introduced. I waited to build my server and now I can build the same 20 to 30 Tbyte server with four times fewer drivers! The cost of drives is not that much lower (due to general shortages here due to flood in Thailand) but the cost of the enclosure and interfaces is much lower now.
Ah, what a joy it is to be in computing where everyday, millions of dollars is thrown at giving us something for nothing!
I set up server at our vacation house to record of air digital programs. I added a 1.5 Tbyte drive to it to hold the programming. At home we have the Comcast DVR that has a tiny drive and holds just a few programs. Imagine my surprise when I see our vacation house PC DVR tell me it has 50 episode of some daily program! It has recorded so much that I don't know I will ever be able to watch it all.
The 4 TByte drive from Hitach retails for $300 to $350. I don't remember what I paid for my 4 MegByte drive but I think it was more than this. That IBM drive failed a year later. Ironically, IBM sold its hard disk business to Hitachi. In turn, Western Digital is buying Hitachi hard disk business.
If you are just dealing with audio, 4 Tbyte drive is not of much value to you. But for video, it is a godsend. To put things in context, a full Blu-ray disc uses 0.05 TBytes of space. So every 20 takes 1 Tbyte. A 4 Tbyte drive therefore can hold 80 discs. So as you see, in that context, this is not that big of a drive.
What is nice about a 4 Tbyte drive is that you need fewer of them to build a server to hold your library. It is relatively easy to stuff 8 or 10 drives in a system. Going to 20 or 30 is much harder in the form of needing for drive interfaces, and large enough case to hold them all. When I started to think about building my server, the largest drive was 1 Tbytes and 1.5 Tbyte drivers were just being introduced. I waited to build my server and now I can build the same 20 to 30 Tbyte server with four times fewer drivers! The cost of drives is not that much lower (due to general shortages here due to flood in Thailand) but the cost of the enclosure and interfaces is much lower now.
Ah, what a joy it is to be in computing where everyday, millions of dollars is thrown at giving us something for nothing!
I set up server at our vacation house to record of air digital programs. I added a 1.5 Tbyte drive to it to hold the programming. At home we have the Comcast DVR that has a tiny drive and holds just a few programs. Imagine my surprise when I see our vacation house PC DVR tell me it has 50 episode of some daily program! It has recorded so much that I don't know I will ever be able to watch it all.