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When will we get >750 GB drives?

C

corfe83

Member
I'm building a personal server to store all my data and automatically keep incremental backups. I notice that on pricewatch, newegg, etc. that 750 GB is the largest SATA drive I can buy - and the price shows it. 750 GB drives have been out for QUITE a while (6+ months I believe), so does anyone know when they might be coming out with the next size up? 900 GB, 1 TB, 1.2 TB, etc.?

Is this something they would usually come out with for the holiday season? Is there a place to see hard drive companys' roadmaps? Do I just have to twiddle my fingers and pray?

I'm hoping when they do come out with something bigger it would bring a 750 gigger in my price range, and surely they must be close to coming out with something bigger by now!
 
It makes more sense to buy several smaller drives, anyway, you can get close to a terabyte of storage with three drives for 300 bucks.
 
Get 6 250 GB hard drives and create a 750GB striped and mirrored raid array. It will have excellent transfer speed and have redundancy. Right now you can get 6 250 GB hard drives for a total of $300. With Black Friday you may be able to go $250 for all 6. If you plan to access the data on the server frequently you would be much better off with a raid array of smaller hard drives, plus they cost less per GB. There is a reason that there's no big rush by manufacturers to get drive larger than 750GB on the market and that's because a raid array is a better option for almost all applications.
 
Well, that's not a bad idea, getting several smaller drives. But it's a little weird for my situation. I'd rather have incremental backups than a RAID 1 array (gives me some history, in case I want an older verison of a file or a deleted file, etc.). It also protects against the rare event of filesystem corruption due to crash / driver bug / OS bug.

That being said, with your advice, perhaps I could get 2 smaller 250 GB drives, but I hate to have a RAID 0 array for my backup drive (Larger chance for one to fail, and I don't need speed on a backup drive so much), but if I do RAID 1 then the two drives would actually be smaller than my main data drive (300 GB) which doesn't make sense for an incremental backup.

Maybe I'll get 3 250 GB drives, and mix them up in some kind of crazy RAID array (RAID 5?) or I'll go back to my original plan of buying a 400 or 500 gigger...

Anyways, I'm half talking to myself, for the odd browsing user who is in a similar situation. Thanks for your replies.
 
Seagate released a 750gb sata 2 16mb cache' ages ago ......I got mine about 6months ago.

Maxtor are about to launch a 1 TB sata2 16mb
 
For cost purposes, it seems a better deal to have more at a lesser price than pay more for the same result.
Case in point. I just purchased 4 HDDs at a average of $50. 2 were WD 250GB. At those prices, it seems more sensible to get the 250s than buying the 500s, don't you agree?

For those who don't have the "big bucks" to splurge and have been accustomed to keeping a "wise eye" opened for good deals, especially like the "new pulls" that we can find on various auction sites. It doesn't matter if they aren't "brand new", but if they do the job, great. For some of us, it's a way of life.

So keep using your common sense, because when it comes down to it, its all we can rely on. Good buying.
 
Originally posted by: zest
Seagate released a 750gb sata 2 16mb cache' ages ago ......I got mine about 6months ago.

Maxtor are about to launch a 1 TB sata2 16mb
Click to expand...

Ugh - it's Maxtor. :Q

If Quantum was around I'd have no problems with theirs. Granted their actuators were about as loud as those old Harvey Wallbanker impact printers, but they were nimble and rock solid. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: pkme2
For cost purposes, it seems a better deal to have more at a lesser price than pay more for the same result.
Case in point. I just purchased 4 HDDs at a average of $50. 2 were WD 250GB. At those prices, it seems more sensible to get the 250s than buying the 500s, don't you agree?

For those who don't have the "big bucks" to splurge and have been accustomed to keeping a "wise eye" opened for good deals, especially like the "new pulls" that we can find on various auction sites. It doesn't matter if they aren't "brand new", but if they do the job, great. For some of us, it's a way of life.

So keep using your common sense, because when it comes down to it, its all we can rely on. Good buying.
Click to expand...


So you use 4x the energy cost instead of 1x to store the same amount of data?
 
Originally posted by: SuperNaruto
seagate annouced 2.5tb desktop drives already.. wtf are you guys talking about..

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/15/seagate_tb_hard_drives/

🙂
Click to expand...

They are not planned until 2009.
Maxttor 1 Tb is now......
Originally posted by: MS Dawn
Originally posted by: zest
Seagate released a 750gb sata 2 16mb cache' ages ago ......I got mine about 6months ago.

Maxtor are about to launch a 1 TB sata2 16mb
Click to expand...

Ugh - it's Maxtor. :Q

If Quantum was around I'd have no problems with theirs. Granted their actuators were about as loud as those old Harvey Wallbanker impact printers, but they were nimble and rock solid. 🙂
Click to expand...


Well Seagat own Maxtor now & I think this may be the 1st colaboration drive..
I don't like Maxtor either.
BTW the new Hitachi range is looking good.....The 320 in particular.
 
Originally posted by: SuperNaruto
Originally posted by: pkme2
For cost purposes, it seems a better deal to have more at a lesser price than pay more for the same result.
Case in point. I just purchased 4 HDDs at a average of $50. 2 were WD 250GB. At those prices, it seems more sensible to get the 250s than buying the 500s, don't you agree?

For those who don't have the "big bucks" to splurge and have been accustomed to keeping a "wise eye" opened for good deals, especially like the "new pulls" that we can find on various auction sites. It doesn't matter if they aren't "brand new", but if they do the job, great. For some of us, it's a way of life.

So keep using your common sense, because when it comes down to it, its all we can rely on. Good buying.
Click to expand...


So you use 4x the energy cost instead of 1x to store the same amount of data?
Click to expand...


IMO, the two 250s are more sensible than buying one 500. I think there are many out there who believe that this makes more sense. You got to prove it to me that using more energy will negate the savings.
 
to the OP.

Where are you planning on storing your incremental backups?

honestly your best bet is to utilize some raid 5 (stripes across all disks, if one fails you pop a new drive in, and rebuild the array)

If you are doing incremental backups, you can go with tapes, or do those to an external hard drive.

Depends entireley on the amount of space you need and the speed requirements....but raid 5 is the way to go.

a single 750 GB disk is not nearly as good as a raid 5 of 250gb's...personally i have 4x750gb raid 5 array in my server...and important stuff backed up on an external drive.
 
Originally posted by: pkme2
IMO, the two 250s are more sensible than buying one 500. I think there are many out there who believe that this makes more sense. You got to prove it to me that using more energy will negate the savings.
Click to expand...

It's very easy to explain why larger drives can end up being much better than smaller drives. It's as simple as higher capacity. My machine that I'm replacing soon has 1.3TB in like 5-6 HDDs ( I can't even remember anymore ). My newer PC will have (I already have 2 of the 3 HDDs) 3x 750GB and then a ?? GB Raptor for the OS. So, with 4 drives, I will come close to doubling what my current PC has with 6.

Six hard drives is also quite a bit of heat and my current case is such a horridly designed case (thanks Thermalgive) that I don't get very good air flow. So the drives are hotter than they would be in another solution. So, as long as the larger density drive isn't a hotter drive, you could also keep your PC's ambient temperature down. Even if the drive is hotter, you may be able to dissipate that heat easier as there will be less physical drives crammed together.
 
I got about 600GB in my system right now, with another 400GB spread across 3 spare HDs. I don't see the point in having more than 2 HDs in the system at one time, but that's just me. More HDs means more heat and noise. I use one HD for OS/Programs/Storage and another for Scratch/PageFile/Storage.

 
Also since this is for a network server, 2 drives would also allow me to get a microATX board, which is preferable.

Where'd you hear about the 1 TB Maxtor drive coming out soon? I might wait for that one before ordering...
 
Where are you planning on storing your incremental backups?
Click to expand...

One drive is for storage (I already own this drive, it's 300 GB), and the other drive is to hold a backup copy of everything on the 300 GB, AND all the historic diffs (so it needs to be bigger - I'm not sure by how much, but I'm shooting for 400 or 500 gigs). I'm going to use rdiff-backup for this, which I hear good things about (mostly that it's simple, reliable, and fast).
 
Considering fewer larger versus more smaller in RAID is missing the forest for the trees, as 'twere. RAID isn't a backup, per se, but in any case beyond reliability it all comes down to security. Some flavour of RAID may be adequate for your needs if it were in a secure location however the typical home is subject to various forms of damage or loss. So whichever way you go they really must be duplicated and physically seperated in the most secure place possible. The minimum might be, say, in the same building but at least in water-proof bags in a fire-proof safe. Just a thought. 😉
 
Well, that's a good point - even with two non-RAIDed drives in the machine, there could be a fire, a power supply that zaps all my drives, or some other disaster.

To prevent that, I will do another regular but infrequent manual backup (maybe copy all data to DVD's every 6 months, and keep the latest set at work, or something like that). Or maybe I'll get a tape drive eventually, and keep the extra tape at work.

In the short term, however, I want to get some kind of automatic system set up to prevent problems caused by a hard drive failure or user error (me or my wife accidentally deleting something). I've had problems with both over the years, and so I want to know I have some level of protection.
 
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