Brennan’s Blog

I have a lot of files to store on my computers at home. I have my PC for lots of different games, music and photos. I also have my iBook which I use for everything beyond gaming, like email, web and software development. For storage I have set up a FreeBSD box with a very large drive running Samba with a couple of large storage drives. And when I say large storage I mean 160gb which I just bought recently for about $140. I that drive bought recently and it has an 8mb cache and is very fast. I was happy to get such a nice drive for that price.

So today I am browsing the Apple Store and see the LaCie Big Disk Extreme, a drive which holds 500GB connected with Firewire 800. That is both big and fast. Imagine what I could do with a drive with that kind of storage, like holding tons of home digital video. It would be great to make highlight films for hurling or play around with the camera and create my own Monty Python inspired shorts to be released on my website.

But what about backup?

Then you gotta wonder, what is the drive fails? I had an unhappy disk failure this year and was able to restore data from it, but for 500GB I would really need some major backup space. Burning CDs or DVDs for anything over 500mb is just too cumbersome. A DLT Tape Drive may hold up to 320GB and the drive itself would cost a pretty penny. You may want to simply get a second LaCie 500GB drive just for redundancy.

500GB just blows my mind. A full terabyte is not far off. And when the Internet 2 speed record now shows that a DVD full of media could be transferred in 4 seconds, I can see a real use for a terabyte of storage. I bet I could hold all of the Seinfeld, Starget SG-1, Alias and Sopranos episodes easily on 500GB.