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OK; maybe this "Fisheye" view of the Fermi labs' data center is stretching it a bit, but I've gone a bit storage crazy lately. I guess, my little digital world at home is a microcosm of our data oriented world at large. I have a lot of data, and it seems to be growing at an exponential rate. The main source of the growth is my movie ripping project. At this point, I'm at about 325 films. This creates two issues. One is the "basic" file of the movie once the incription has been stripped away. It's a pretty big file. That's why I use Handbrake to crunch it down to a more manageable 1-1.5Gb file in an MP4 format. This gives me a relatively decent looking picture on a small screen such as a tablet or even notebook computer. However, I don't want to get rid of the original file, so I don't have to rip the thing again in the future. Of course, that leaves me with a lot of data to store. Just the MP4s alone add up to 400Gb of data..... and I'm not even halfway through my library!
As I'm accumulating this stuff, I've progressively felt a "space"-crunch. Given that my server had 2, 2Tb drives in it, plus a 3Tb backup, I'm not certain that's real, or just my head playing games with me! Be that as it may, I start adding drives at the end of the summer. Here's how it went down. I bought Hitachi drives whenever I could. Based on my experience and things that I've read, they seem to be the best bet on a $$$ vs. life-span equation. I used to be a Western Digital guy, but over time, my loyalty such as it is, has progressively moved over to Hitachi. Now, that they've been bought out by the big WD, I guess the issue is moot. In the last several months, I found a few good deals and bought 1, 2Tb, and 2, 1.5Tb Deskstar drives. The 2Tb one went into the file server and took the last spot on the HighPoint caching RAID controller giving it 6Tb of internal storage. The 1.5Tb drives have gone to live in the workstation to augment the 1Tb drive that was rapidly filling up. I've configured it where one of them is permanently attached (like the 1Tb drive), and the other residing in one of the two "hot-swap" bays. This will give not only quadruple the storage space, but will allow me the ability to use it as "removable mass storage". I can put LOTS of data on that drive; kick it out without opening the case, and plug it into the file server moving the data at SATA III bus speed!
As things like this seem to happen, more storage possibilities fell on me "out of nowhere". While discussing selling/trading a laptop drive with someone, he offered me a Toshiba Canvio, external hard drive case (with power supply) for almost nothing. Of course I took it! Actually, it's a clone of the 3Tb external that I have attached to the file server as a "backup". The interface is USB 3.0, so pretty quick. Now, all I have to do is find a deal on a big disk to go in it. Most likely, it'll be a Toshiba, as they seem to run specials on them regularly after Toshiba ended up with most of Hitachi's desktop drive manufacture capacity during that sell-off. I'm not real certain what I'd do with another 2 or 3Tb external drive, but you know what they say: "you can never have too much storage".
As if the portable side of my digital life was feeling left out, things started hopping there as well. While looking for drives, I ran across a 2.5" Orico USB 3.0 drive enclosure for cheap ($12). So, I bought it and put a spare 500Gb drive in it. This thing gave me the ability to move large amounts of data around quickly due to the USB 3.0 interface. Very convenient when both my brother-in-law AND I were ripping our movies and need a good way to consolidate the files on one drive. The almost 400Gb of movies fit on there great.
WAY better than what had been my one and only USB 3.0 device; the iOmega SSD Flash drive. While it's super fast with a 1.8" Intel X18 SSD in it; the storage size of 80Gb wasn't big enough to do anything serious. Essentially, it's just a big flash drive.
Right in the middle of all this, I started working on my OTP (Old ThinkPad) Server project. An outgrowth of it was to use my Lacie Porsche Design external drive enclosures.The only issue here was that not only was the enclosure IEEE-1394 (Firewire) interface, but internally, it's IDE/PATA! After digging around, I was able to find that I had a Seagate (I know, I know...I had it, so what're ya gonna do?) that came out of an old machine. Now I need to find another one, (hopefully, this time, a non-Seagate) for the it's twin. While working on that project, I learned from another "ThinkPadder" that you can buy an UltraBay 2000 adapter that will take SATA drives. This will give me the ability to put in any size I want in the internal bays of the A31 up to 12.7mm in height. I believe the largest capacity of that physical size is 1.5Tb. However, I'll go with a Seagate 500Gb drive that came in a machine I was given when they upgraded. I know; another Seagate, but it's hard to turn down free!!!
While all the storage madness was going on..... I filled out a survey. "What you talkin' about Willis!?!" OK, I didn't just fill out a survey, but wrote a review too, on my "new" X1. In return, Lenovo sent me a coupon for a promotion to get an F800, Multi-Mode storage device for half off! What is it? It's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external hard drive with it's own battery (which can charge other devices like phones), and a built-in access point. You might have also notice the Ethernet port as well. And you'd be right! It can function as a network "bridge" as well! Hard to tell from this picture, but imagine an regular 2.5" portable drive, but fatter.
That's 7! I've added 7 terabytes of storage in the last month....and I'm not even through. I'll probably add another 2 or 3 over the course of the next few months as well. I'm a little be astounded myself.
I think everyone is clear on my feelings about Best Buy by now. Yet, that's exactly where I was today, AND came out of the store carrying something more than a DVD or CD. Yes indeed; I did in fact buy a computer product from the enemy. Why would I consort with "that sort"? Well, Christmas happened, and we have this family gift tradition where you draw names and this years poor misguided family member knowing that I was the "techie" type decided that a gift card from Best Buy would be in order! After cursing my fate and kicking the cat (not really),then after 3 months of head-scratching, I just couldn't think of some way to magically make it be PayPal credit. So today with daughter in tow, there I was in the lair of the great satan trying desperately to find something ....anything, that wasn't ridiculously overpriced! I had that $25, as well as a rebate card for $10 from buying RAM some time ago. So, all-in-all, I had $35; meaning I could buy something like flash storage of some sort worth the amount, or apply it to something that was in fact priced decently. So why the dump truck of earth moving proportions? Remember my last post? I'm about to embark on a server rebuild.......ahhhh......."I see, said the blind man to his deaf daughter". I have a lot of data to move. In fact I've been looking at external drive enclosures and bare drives of 2Tb (or larger) to do this with AND then to function as backup to the server of the future.
.....And on the last aisle before car stereos, stashed among the legions of Western Digital and Seagate storage was a little display of Toshiba Canvio external drives marked with little "As Advertised" signs. On one shelf were 2 boxes of the the 2Tb versions at $99.95 which is really a pretty darned good price, but sadly, the shelf directly above marked for the 3Tb ones at $119.95 was empty! While I stood there silently cursing my fate and contemplating buying the 2Tb drive, I came across one of the brainless blue-shirted automatons (Best Buy employees to the uninitiated), so I asked if he could look up the store in a neighboring suburb to see if they still had some of the 3Tb ones in stock. Twenty-five minutes later, another of the automatons came back to point out that there were several more completely somewhere else instead of the marked display. I was too overjoyed to be annoyed by this little piece of "BB" stupidity, so happily paid $85 (after expending my cards) for 3Tb of storage in an unobtrusive enclosure sporting a USB 3.0 interface. If my math is right, that's less than $30 per terabyte, meaning every dollar I spent bought about 33 gigs of storage. Just typing that makes me a little giddy.
Oh, but this gets better! Inside of this relatively unobtrusive little box resides....wait for it......a Hitachi hard disk drive!!! I know I said that it's a Toshiba "Canvio" (whatever the hell that is), but you see, it's a bit of a convoluted tale. You guys may be aware that my preferred mechanical storage maker is/was Hitachi. It used to be IBM who sold their drive division to Hitachi. For whatever reason, Western Digital Corporation (who I don't hate, but not my fave) bought out HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) last year.
However, due to some pressure from various regulatory organizations around the world who frown on monopolies, they had to divest themselves of one of Hitachi's Chinese factories which made drives of capacities up to 3Tb. Thus enters our friends from Toshiba.
Had this been an actual Toshiba product, I'd have never bought it. The last time I had any dealings with Toshiba hard drives was when they would randomly spit up the MBR about once a year. However, I knew the desktop Canvios (???) with that peculiar 5900 rpm (actually 5940) rotational speed was actually a restickered Hitachi with their "Coolspin technology".
I don't know all the convoluted machinations of this weird triangular agreement, but I do know that there are a bunch of "Toshiba" re-labled Hitachi's out there for sale at pretty low prices compared to other brands.
All I know is that I was able to get a competitively priced ($119 is the same as Newegg) product at Best Buy where $35 of that was essentially "written off". So I paid $85 for something which was exactly what I needed, I'd have probably even bought it if it was a Western Digital or a Seagate, but that it was a rebranded Hitachi was just icing on the cake. Oh, and almost forgot to mention that the new motherboard on the rebuilt server has USB 3.0, so yeah; a perfect match for this new drive.
