Does anyone know if the terabyte drives are in Taiwan yet? The 750GB drives seemed to take a long time to arrive, and they’re still outrageously priced compared to the US. I haven’t seen the terabyte drives at all.
Wow…you must have a heck of a lot of porn…
It’s for my wife, who is into video editing. I bought her a 320GB drive, and that lasted a couple of months. Last week I bought her a 500GB drive, and she’s already halfway through it (about 2 hours of footage from our trip to Korea did the trick).
I have in mind something like this for the future.
My storage needs are far less demanding. I only have two drives in my rig, a 150GB Raptor and a 160GB Raptor. Aside from Windows and music (probably 80GB total), the bulk of my data constitutes my photography (lots of RAW files), and hundreds of electronic monographs and journals for research purposes.
Fortigurn -
OK…ok…just joking. My data needs are just a lot more modest - music, some DL’ed vids on occasion and a small amount of pictures - and it just amazes me that both what is now available and that there is actually a need for it.
Good luck with your search.
I know what you mean. As you can see, I’ve never needed even as much as 300GB myself. I still have about 80GB free on my two drives. But video editing is another story again.
I might end up purchasing one from the US.
On a more serious note,
is it better to have a giant terabyte drive, or to separate smaller drives for reasons of hardware failure rates?
My experience at Guang hua has shown that when a new drive comes out, the $/mb cost is not as economical as buying a 2nd tier unit. i.e. it would be cheaper for you to get 2x 500gb drives, even if the 1tb drive was available here.
Not sure if that would suit your purposes or not.
I looked around here, but the prices were a bit much compared to what I could find online. Looked again when I was back in BC last week, and the prices were still over the top. Might as well order one from amazon.com
How about getting a disk array (RAID), not sure if this would work out cheaper maybe a wash though you would have the added advantage of protection in most cases.
For instance building a RAID0 disk would use 3 drives in total, if each was a 500GB drive you would end up with 1500GB, building a RAID5 with those same disks would net you 1000GB, but data would be recoverable in the case of a single HDD failure…
You can pickup RAID controller cards pretty easily.
That’s why I don’t buy at Guanghua when new drives come out. I either wait, or I buy them when travelling overseas.
I have no idea why, but hard drives always seem overpriced here. Connel, RAID 5 is probably where I’ll end up eventually, but right now it’s easier to simply throw stuff on one large drive and simply ghost a backup to another drive.
CHecking out your pics on smugmug. cool. what kind of camera you using?
Thanks, it’s a Nikon D80. For real photography, see the Daily Photos thread in ‘Living in Taiwan’.
Don’t mean to get off topic, but have you seen the specs for the new D300? holy toledo, batman.
hopefully that will drive prices down for the D200 and D80. Then I can put together something.
Don’t mean to get off topic, but have you seen the specs for the new D300? holy toledo, batman.
hopefully that will drive prices down for the D200 and D80. Then I can put together something.[/quote]
Yeah, both the D3 and the D300 are amazing. A mate of mine is planning on picking up the D300 next year, and I’ll be asking him for his 2ndhand D200 when he does.
If you’re technically-minded, you can try to build a mini-RAID. If you have a desktop computer with a free expansion slot, you can get a RAID card and 2 500-gig hard drives and make a 1TB RAID0. Not only does that combine the two drives so they act as one, but the effective read/write speed is nearly doubled, which I hear helps quite a bit with video editing. But as mentioned before, with a RAID0, if either disk fails, all of your data is lost.
There are also several RAID5-esque solutions, like the Infrant or Buffalo TeraStation, which you can put four 500gig hard drives in and it gives you 1.5TB of working space as well as redundancy against any one drive failing.
I have considered 500GB x 2 in RAID 0 for 1 terabyte of high speed storage, but backing it up is another matter - and that’s where the 1TB drive comes in.
My wife’s current rig only has one SATA port in any case. My intention is to move her to a new rig with 3 or 4 SATA ports on it, and then go from there (by which time 500GB x 2 in RAID 0 should be pretty cheap). For now, I’m just considering what I can do with 1 SATA port (I threw in a 3 port SATA card, but it didn’t agree with her rig).
I second on the RAID soultion.
Best to get an external RAID drive. Maybe a NAS (Network Attached Storage) running with RAID5. Some newer drives can support upto and over 2tbs.
After 2x120g and 1x200g hds crash within the same month, I decided to get a NAS. I lost so much valuable data after the crashs from before so I setup my NAS to run RAID5. It really works…!! I am currently using 4x320G and I tried pulling out one of the drives (to simulate a drive failure) and installing a new drive. I took a couple of hours for the drives to rebuild, but afterwards, nothing was lost.
On my unit, I can even increase the capacity of my storage space by buying and inserting new drives (it just rebuilds itself)
In the future, I’ll be purchasing one of these for exactly that purpose, but for now just another drive will do.
Ever think about just getting a nice NAS box and load it up with a few 500gbs? Oh I see that’s what you linked in your post. 
Yea, I would definatly go with a raid 5 NAS 4 500gbs and u get 1tb.
I’ve been lucky with all my HDD and never had a failure. 
Wonderful. While terabyte drives in Taiwan aren’t even available yet, terabyte drives in Australia are selling for NT$,8220, which is significantly less expensive than 750GB drives are selling for here (NT$11,340). What a ripoff.