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Pretty Awsome

June 15, 2009, 3:45 pm

A 128GB flash drive.

I remember my first mass storage device - a 10MB PC add-in card.  My first thought -- I will never be able to fill that up!  Last month I finished my do-it-yourself  $1000** version of a $60,000 Kaleidescape video server (article to follow on how I did it).    My system has a 6TB capacity Raid 5 drive using 8 one TB drives (if that does not add up, it is because one of the drives is configured as a hot spare).  And the freaking thing is over 70% full already.

** This is, of course, if you treat my time as worth zero, especially for the process of ripping 400+ DVDs.

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7 Comments

  1. Billy Ruff'n:

    I also remember my first mass storage device. It measured about 7 x 16 x 24 inches, stored 5 MB and cost $7,000-8,000, if memory serves. But then again, my memory is beginning to fail!

    June 15, 2009, 4:33 pm

  2. Larry Sheldon:

    Don't lose sight of the fact that while the capacity of discs has increased, the size of stuff on the discs has increased at a much higher rate.

    A 360kB diskette would hold the Operating System, the application program, and the data the program used.

    We used to do all of the telephone company's billing, collecting, toll accounting and prepare printed telephone books on machines with no disc, 10 or 11 256BPI 7-track tapes and 10,000 decimal words (10 digits or 5 alphanumeric characters per word). (The conversion is not exact, but that would be about 50,000 bytes in today's notation. But the bottom 1000 words were index registers, and the IOCS (no OS, yet) took 1700 more.)

    See Parkinson's Law. (Written before work was done by machines.)

    June 15, 2009, 6:51 pm

  3. epobirs:

    Actually, the prices in that article for the smaller USB drives were way high. Good 32GB units have gone as low as $30 this year and 64GB have been well under $100. Prices are up recently but the deals are out there if you look. I just picked up a 8 GB MicroSD card for under $20 so my neice can have her entire Nintendo DS library in a single pseudo-cartridge. She doesn't have anywhere near enough games to fill it up, even with emulators for all of her old games from other mask ROM based platforms but with flash space going that cheap it isn't a concern.

    June 15, 2009, 9:58 pm

  4. Danny:

    I'm guessing you built your own MythTV box?

    June 16, 2009, 10:44 am

  5. colson:

    6tb. Wow! It goes fast especially if you are ripping high def dvd content and recording a lot of video. I was applauding my friend who had 2tb just last year although I must say it is awefully nice to have a centalized media hub for sharing content around the house.

    June 16, 2009, 4:10 pm

  6. MGW:

    Could someone point me to directions on how to rip DVDs? I've been wanting to watch DVDs on my laptop, but it has no optical drive. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a way to do this.

    Thanks for your help.

    June 18, 2009, 7:43 am

  7. Steve S:

    I don't even want to know how long it takes to rip 400+ DVD's. Though I imagine it's a lot faster than ripping, then re-mastering.

    MGW: Google 'DVD ripping instructions'. That should get you pointed in the right directions.

    June 19, 2009, 12:40 am