(allusion)
On Monday, I bought a Seagate 300gb HD at Fry’s for a record low price. On Tuesday evening, after a bit of trouble with the power supply, I got it installed and started a bad block scan.
It’s still running, on Friday night as I write this. It’ll probably finish sometime during the night. So that’s around 80 hours to read then write every sector on the disk 4 times. Twenty hours to fill the disk.
That’s insane.
Who could possibly need that much space? I sure don’t. Even after I integrate it into the RAID ((We’re going from a 160gb 2-drive RAID 1 to a 320gb 3-drive RAID 5 on the same spindles without rebooting. Because I’m crazy like that.)), I’ll still have a few hundred gigs free on the system. I might have to start stockpiling films, more than the few Kurosawas I’ve torrented. Or perhaps I’ll make every vhost on the system a usermode-linux virtual machine, each with a ~4gb filesystem image.
Remember when hard drives and filsystems couldn’t handle 4gb? The progression of technology is amazing to me, and I’ve only been at it ten years or so. What must it be like for real old farts like these fine people? Apparently, Creed doesn’t have a site these days?
Hey, you wanna pick me up one of those?
Being called a “real old fart” and “real fine people” in the same sentence: a rather mixed-mode classification.
PS: Telling the world you’ve got or want films seems to be a risky thing to do.
Some of us old farts are working on things like HD video editing where 300 Gb is sorta the least capacity worth the install time.
I remember seeing my first 90 Mb drive. (CDC Phoenix: big, heavy and power hungry.) I said there was no way we’d ever fill that sucka.
In hindsight, I worded the post poorly. I meant no disrespect to you folks. Just wanted to invite some contemplation of how far things have come, and your lifteimes have seen much more change than mine. I do know you’re working with FCP, Creed, and for that matter Eryk’s doing Xsan, where the terabyte is a more useful measure.
BTW, I meant to explain how small 300Gb is. Many uncompressed HD formats consume 10+Gb/minute of content. Few HD formats will allow much more than an hour of content on 300Gb. While that may be an interminable amount of home video footage of aunt Edna’s 80th birthday, it’s not much for the serious videographer.
For rule-of-thumb numbers, look at the second table at http://kb.ciprico.com/lore/article.php?id=222
Ask Eryk how long it takes to initialize a 7Tb raid system. You got up and going quickly.
(Kids these days…. :-P )