Re: cheaper & cheaper storage (was Re: GOT HARDWARE? - Anyone have 40GB IDE hard drives they're wanting to get rid of?)

Greg Merritt wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2007, at 12:58 PM, Jack Burris wrote:
> And flash memory? I'll bet that in the next year or two, they'll be
> selling 1GB SD cards in five packs or ten packs for the cost of a nice
> lunch.

They already do. There're 4packs of 1GB of USB drives. Not sure if
they'd do that with just the cards, like SD or CF. Most snapshooters
still have have difficulty filling up a 1GB card even with their 7MP
cameras.

> How is the dirt-cheap cost of storage changing the way you're using
> storage? For example, I am too lazy to back up my iPhoto library as
> regularly as I should. At $10 for a 1GB SD card, I realized the other
> day that I should simply take each card that I fill, put it in an
> envelope with a date label, and toss it on the shelf as backup... and
> then buy a new card for the camera. Sure, more costly per GB than a DVD
> or an external backup drive, but not really very expensive at all per
> photo.
>
> What else are folks starting to do differently thanks to low-and-falling
> storage costs?

You know, that might not be a bad idea once the price on them really
drops. I, however, are those who set their camera on constant shooting
modes and burn through a 4GB card in an afternoon(and maybe get 2 or 3
decent shots out of it.) I do feel nervous about putting my trust on
DVD drives.

One thing I'm seeing is the increasing difficulty in finding the smaller
drives to replace the failing drives in the existing RAID arrays. We've
had difficulty finding replacements to our RAID array of 250GB IDE
drives few months back, though that has more to do with the transition
from IDE to SATA.

And what I'm seeing are people who are buying these massive external USB
drives and use it for backup. But I'm also seeing higher failure rates
on these USB drives. There are few elements that makes these drives
more prone to failure, such as poor cooling element. But a lot of
people don't consider these. Many also use it as their primary storage
when they run out of space on their home desktop. With bigger and
bigger hard drives, that's putting a *lot* of eggs in one basket.

-- 
John Kim
System and Network Security
http://security.berkeley.edu
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following was automatically added to this message by the list server:
For information about Micronet, including subscribing to
or unsubscribing from its mailing list and finding out
about upcoming meetings, please visit the Micronet Web site:
<http://micronet.berkeley.edu/>.