it had to come

[GTB_an_Owl]

is this your next "must have" computer purchase

1TB (Terabyte) 1000GB 32MB 7200 3.5" Serial-ATA 3.0Gb/s Hitachi Hard Drive


you must need one of these h0ughy with all the pictures you take

geoff

[mill]

Dont do it houghy think about the boss :P
And that drive is getting way too big, imagine formatting it.
And not to mention the time it will take to defrag.
I have about 500GB and defragging that takes all night and then some more :(

[erick]

With a TByte to play with, makes you wonder why a system wouldn't just look for the next available space it can fit the whole file into! Fragmented files could be a thing of the past?

How many $s, BTW?

[mill]

Erick as soon as you delete an file and write another file on the disk it will become fragmented if the file is larger than the space the deleted file took up on the disk.
The only way to prevent fragmentation is to defrag often (every week or so).

[erick]

But that's what I am saying, Martin. When disk space is no object, why couldn't the operating system find the next available space the file will fit into. Yes, it will leave lots of holes, but all files will be contiguous. I'm presuming that operating systems to date have always tried to fill all the holes to save running out of disk space quickly. Sorry if I'm missing something obvious here! :doh:

[mill]

If we are talking about windws there is no hope in "you know what" that files will be written contiguous, that is the biggest flaw in windows :(
I think that only linux writes files contiguous on the harddrive.
Both ext2 and ReiserFS provide features such as user-level security and more efficient use of disk space, so that defragmentation tools, although they do exist for ext2 at least, are rarely needed.
Windows is just very sloppy with harddisk space :(

[erick]

Thanks, now I know.

[g__day]

With the performaqnce and reliability of the high speed SATA2 interface - a RAID'ed multi-terabyte disk platform is quite a reality nowadays. Many folk at atomicmpc (high end users) actually have this nowadays.

You can run RAID designed at the low end simply for either performance (striping) or reliability (mirroring) called RAID 0 or 1 arrays, or with a more advanced controller and additional disks get hybrids that have great scalability, performance and reliability (RAID 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7).

Personally I've gone on and off caching hard disk controllers (early nineties) to ever larger disks, to multiple hard drives in each machine (early 2000), to RAID arrays (last year - for performance) and relied on backup using a strategy that adopts NOS (network attached storage) plus ensuring critical data is always on at least 2 independent PCs.

Next step for me is probably RAID my NOS to a fully mirrored 3 disk set-up, presented as drive z: to all PCs on my network, and place all critical data there and on at least one other machine.

Fully electrically isolated from mains via high end UPS, including all broadband and fax - is the only way to go!

The next step from here is likely to involve RAID'ing SSHD - solid state hard drives or hybrid solid state drives.

[radu5er]

Truer words were never spoken...

Also check out the network attached storage solutions using older hardware such as:

Naslite (http://www.serverelements.com/) and FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/)

Both are Linux based so they do not have fragmentation issues and they are quite easy (near plug and play) to use.

I'm using an old 500 Mhz AMD K6-2 Aptiva box with several 320 Gigabyte hard drives in it and it works a treat. Even if the original bios won't recognize the bigger drives these programs are bios independent so the big drives work anyway.

[Portmac]

Western Digital WD10EACS Caviar GP/1 TB/7200 RPM/16 MB/SATA = $499 Aus

[h0ughy]

already looked into this - I have a PC at home with 1.5 terrabytes currently on it.