I have really geeked out. I've been selling & designing those high end disk storage systems for so long now, and even though I back up the disks on all my home & personal computers, I worry. Especially when I hear that high pitched whine coming out of the computers for no reason.

Last week, I started my search for a home,networked storage system, with RAID 1 or 5 protection (if a drive fails, I can recover the data). At the low end, commercial class ones are about $15,000 for 1 TB.

I am such a dinosaur that I remember the days when 1 TB would mean about 2000 huge disk systems in a data center. It would take about 120 hours to back it up to tape. Cost for the 2000 disks? They were 500 MB each and a MB was $30 in 1990. That's $15,000 per disk and a whopping $30 million. They were the size of washing machines.

Now I have 1 TB in a 10" square package - on my desk. It's an Iomega StorCenter and cost $750. This little thing plugs into my wireless-g router. I'll be digitizing more media and pictures, and backing up more storage.

Now that's the thing to plug into your media center and have all your tunes and movies in one place. Imagine this thing with a Tivo or a DV-R in front of it....

Amazing, isn't it?

Those of you with iPods and digital cameras have also benefitted from advances in technology. Think about this:

1 GB = 2 x 500 MB. That 2 GB iPod Nano would have been the equivalent of (4) $15,000 disk drives or $60,000. You paid $149 for it and look at the size compared to 4 washing machines.

Mind boggling.

Do you have a similar techno-geek thing that amazes you?

Yea, even cellphones have gotten as small as desired with more features than people even want and they are practically free. It's hard to buy a plain old cellphone these days.

Then there's cars. When I was in high school, in the late 70's, my family bought a new Import pickup truck, a Datsun 1300 cc, 4 cylinder, pushrod valve, gasoline engine that made a whopping 46 horsepower. It had drum brakes that were good for one stop from 70 mph when loaded with a half ton of driver/fuel/cargo, but it was scary, and a long smoky stop. If you didn't wait for fifteen minutes till you got going again, your next stop from 70 was going to be a lot longer, a lot smokier, and WAAAAY more scary... Getting back up to speed took a while too. It had tinny sheet metal, not too well protected from the elements. It cost $2040, new. It got around 26 to 30 MPG.

A new Import pickup now can have up to 310Horsepower, four wheel disc brakes with w/antilock on all four wheels, V-8 power, with overhead cams, fuel injection, corners at speeds that were only available to esoteric cars in 1970, and barely costs more when inflation is taken into consideration.

Back then tires lasted 20,000 miles if you were careful, and lucky, unless you were a really rich person that could afford Michelin-X radials, a new technology, newly available tire here in the US, and any tire you chose would not pull anywhere beyone about .7G, on any car.

New tires can easily go more than 100k miles, in passenger car use, bearing heavier loads, at higher sustained speeds, having much better traction in the dry, startlingly better traction in the wet, and levels of performance in the cold and snow that were simply a dream back when, all for about the equivalent price as those old era tires.

When is the last time you had to gap the valves, or synchronize the carbs of your car, or change plugs? We used to have to do those things about every 6000 miles, along with rotating and rebalancing the tires.

Look out Billy G! It's not just a thread, it's a WEB of geek-speak

run away - run away - run away

(hey Kat )

I remember in 1984 our shop received our first IBM PC XT complete with a 10MB hard drive (prior all our machines had two floppy drives if you were lucky). We too stood around it in total amazement and said we'll never fill this up. The storage ought to last for years. Just last week I added a 320Gb drive to my personal home machine for a total of just under 1 terabyte (and I'm already licking my chops over a new Seagate 750GB drive).

Billy G! a web of Geek-Speak? :rolleyes: :p

LOL.

I just find it to be amazing that we can buy and use this stuff in our everyday lives.

The first non-mainframe that I worked on was a VAX 11/780. It had 3MB of memory and was bigger than my entire bathroom. When it crashed, I would open the doors and tap the memory boards into place with a rubber mallet.

My first pc was actually a Commodore 64, which I traded in for an Apple IIc.

DW... you're talking about a blade server, only right now they don't have USB interfaces. Soon though.... just a question of time......

I'm shopping for a Gig-E network box for my house. Maybe in the winter, when it's quiet, I'll get around to building another media server for my music....

I just bought a 6GB memory card for my Nikon camera.... that's 12 of those big washing machine sized disk drives from 1990.

I too am amazed how far memory has come. The first computer I ever programmed on was Data General NOVA minicomputer. I was programming firmware for a Litton Systems device. I had all of 16k (not meg) to work with to program the device. I learned to become very creative with assembler language.

My first personal computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 . I still have it and it still works. I taught myself Basic on it. It has a total of 2k of on-board memory. All of my home PCs have 1 gig of memory. Times sure have changed.

I remember my first recording session in the 80's, it took a while to mix the drum sound. Now, all a drummer has to do is lay a track, and pro tools does the rest. Heck, now you can split a 'quence and pro tools running from a laptop to triggers on your drums on a live gig. and, with the Roland Custom Session V's, You can do almost any accoustic gig with them!

hey Dwill...
I have a couple of 500GB drives in my PC, and then some external USB drives to backup the file systems. But the USB was sloooowwww..... and Ghost would wig out during the backup. So I started using Retrospect, which runs on both Windows and Mac - and solved a lot of problems.

The NAS storage solves a lot of sharing headaches between Windows and Mac, too. I mounted the Windows shares as NFS as well.... so the Macs are now connected.

I looked at the Seagate Mirra last week... as well as a couple of other RAID arrays.

http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/mirr

It's a CDP (continuous data protection) box - you tell it which folders/shares to watch and it wakes up on a timed basis and copies new or changed files to itself.

There are 750GB drives on the home system market - single external USB or firewire. Early next year, there will be 1 TB single drives - already on the market in the commercial space. Basically, the bits are perpendicular to the platter - and you can pack the bits more densely, so you get more data on a drive.

(breathe deeply Billy G, I know that was a lot of geek speak).

But I wanted a RAID array...

I also looked at some wacky box that CompUSA had - I would have had to add (4) 250GB or 320GB SATA II drives to the enclosure - and would have come out over $1500. My USB external drives are Iomega, so I went with it. iomega storcenter

However, in the commercial space, the vendors only OEM from 2 sources - Seagate & IBM. (Seagate bought Maxtor).

I did find a Linksys Gig-E switch for about $300. To use the Gig-E switch, I have to put new NIC cards in all my machines.... then I have to figure out what to do for a router for the cable modem... and how to serve up DHCP addresses back to the computers on the switch. The wireless-g router & cable modem at 3 Mb becomes the bottleneck for systems on the switch running at 10 Mb. But I am not going to -no-no-no - look at business class service yet.

Here's a network speed test:
http://www.auditmypc.com/internet-speed-test.asp

Billy G... I know you are really horrified and running fast by now.

I have turned into an ultimo-geek....

and while DWbass is waiting for that Windows blade pc, take a peek at the Mac mini! It's $599 with a 60GB drive. It's dual core. A dual core Windows machine starts at $1000! And you can run Windows in a partition on a Mac....

My Brother seems to think that I will -ahem - get him one for Christmas.

I might get one for me...

Size and weight

* Height: 2 inches (5.08 cm)
* Width: 6.5 inches (16.51 cm)
* Depth: 6.5 inches (16.51 cm)
* Weight: 2.9 pounds (1.31 kg)

Processor and memory

* 1.66GHz or 1.83 Intel Core Duo processor
* 2MB on-chip L2 cache
* 667MHz frontside bus
* 512MB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300) on two DIMMs; supports up to 2GB

(and unlike Windows, you can address that 2 GB of memory)





Mac mini

I agree, too - I want a Bluetooth monitor. My printers, keyboards, mouse(s) are wireless.... I think the graphics issue is similar to high-def TV and what to do about connecting to dv-r, satellite, etc. The multi-pin signal problem.

Hold on - before you cross over to the "dark-side" take a look at Shuttle\'s X100 . It starts at a tad more than the mini-MAc but it does have a few more features: on-board storage (250GB 7200-RPM SATA vs 80GB 5400-RPM SATA), Integrated 4-in-1 card reader, slightly larger power supply. In addition I think the integrated video and audio are better. Check-it out.

X100 - mini-Mac comparison