Posted: 4/20/2011 11:31:19 PM EDT
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Being in the computer industry, I ought to know what is out there now to buy.....but I don't.
Since I bought my lap top probably 4 years ago, it seems what I have been buying is mostly USB hard and thumb drives. Which is what the laptop is mostly working on right now, prepping thousands of files for eventual review on this or that HD. But I am hauling two back packs in and out of work practically daily, one of them loaded with hard drives. I'd rather stop driving to work, bike in instead, and leave a lot of this computer stuff at home. And been thinking, maybe what I need is a new home computer, a new tower. Or....do I? If I got a new tower, I'd build it. Get the mother board and do it. I really don't have much of a use for what a salesman might sell me in a tower. But.....unless the motherboard, maybe the tower is under $200, 300 tops, then maybe I ought to get a newer laptop. I can't build a laptop, well not efficiently, and there is the concern in the back of my mind that the computer world has changed significantly enough that I can't reuse the components that I do when I build towers. So, what's out there? Which direction should I do? Right now, ideally, I would love something that I could plug my various hard drives into and let it process directories (NIYOW and XXCOPY) into one level, auto numbered files as a batch job. That is, when it gets done with one directory, it goes to the next without a human telling it to do so. Something so when I come back the next morning or the next week, it has done it. XXCOPY is DOS level, so it might be possible to program that......don't know about a package such as NIYOW.......though before I came across that, I always dreamed of doing a C program to do them both. Software aside, what's the hardware like out there these days? __________________________________________________________________________ ("You look good in a dress."––Dade Murphy "You would have looked better."––Kate Libby, (w,stte), "Hackers") |
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I'm putting off building a new comp till the Z68 chipset is out for the Core i7 chips
as to your other stuff well it's late and I'm not thinking real clearly but if you just asking to copy some stuff from various external devices - might be easily script-able but it also might not - of course I think there are some stuff built into Win 7 that will auto sync various devices so that would be my first stop on looking But the new core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs from Intel are quite amazing |
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All told, I am probably talking about 20-40 T of information that I am trying to put in manageable order. Rather the accumilation since about 1993, the start of the WWW. That's just the stuff downloaded; it doesn't include the photographic database which maybe a T, it doesn't include the written notes which I haven't even started converting.....and it doesn't include the video library which is probably about 15000 G, if the calculations are correct........which in itself is another consideration. That is, converting video tape to digital computer data and bypassing the DVD............at the consumer level.
It's not "just transferring some files". ____________________________________________________________________ ("The Internet is like a great big reference library......without a card catalog."––early saying of the NET, (w,stte)) |
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Shit
20-40 Terrabytes ? and your doing this with removable hard drives (USB) and a laptop ? umm the word insane comes to mind USB hard drives have pretty sad failure ratings for the near term get you some sort of NAS - DROBO comes to mind (an 8Bay filled with 3TB drives will give you 18ish TB of usable storage - so 2 of those) That would be my first objective Really I couldn't sleep at night if I had ANY important data on USB Hard Drives then I'd look real hard at building a desktop that could handle that much storage Finally your talking about converting analog to digital video correct ? http://www.grassvalley.com/products/converters That is Canopus - about the only name I trust in the conversion business Your gonna need a pretty beefy machine to do this with and please understand me 20-40TB is really not in the playbook of normal desktop computers With NO overhead for parity your talking about 14 3TB drives and right now RAID version of SATA or SAS 3TB drives ain't on the market - at least not yet I'd love to talk more about this - it's kinda what I do - storage - get some firm numbers and fire them to me over IM or the like and I'll see if I can make some recommendations Just keep in mind it's very very strange for me to hear of a home user (even small business) needing 40 TB of storage |
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Quoted: All told, I am probably talking about 20-40 T of information that I am trying to put in manageable order. Rather the accumilation since about 1993, the start of the WWW. That's just the stuff downloaded; it doesn't include the photographic database which maybe a T, it doesn't include the written notes which I haven't even started converting.....and it doesn't include the video library which is probably about 15000 G, if the calculations are correct........which in itself is another consideration. That is, converting video tape to digital computer data and bypassing the DVD............at the consumer level. It's not "just transferring some files". ____________________________________________________________________ ("The Internet is like a great big reference library......without a card catalog."––early saying of the NET, (w,stte)) You're going to need to build a massive server or pay for online storage... possibly some kind of cloud storage, but I'm not familiar with it to know how that would work. 
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The 20-40 was an estimate......maybe less, maybe more......and stuff that has been stored in CD's in the past number of years. Some of it went into storage pretty well ordered, such as the Dreyden Flight Center photo collection.....a lot of it didn't. But often at the time, it was put it on CD to make room on the tower's HD and I'll sort it later...................and we all know how that equation works.
But even though CD's in a drawer are accessible, they still have to be put in a drive....and there is very little that one can write on the front of a CD. So unless one gets the exact CD, it can be tedious. Hence one of the reasons to transfer them back to HD, now that HD prices have come down. And, in the event of a HD failure........there are always the original CD drawers. ______________________________________________________________ ("But you've stored cell tissue to repeat the process again?"––the first clone looking on his aged donor body in horror "Provided the original is available.....,"––the doctor, (w,stte), "Forever and Amen" by Robert Bloch) |
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This ain't gonna be cheap
Keep that in the back of your mind for example I've got one design that while it can scale to approx 220TB on line storage has a cost for disks alone at 64K - don't even price 220TB of disk from Netapp unless you want a coronary sure costs have come WAY down but anytime your talking about buying a rather large amount of them it ain't cheap I'd be looking if I were you into something rack mounted that had 24 slots and a highend raid card in the "computer" SAS expander in the drive box and it could be daisy chained to more drive boxes if the demand for storage goes up for that matter your first drive box can also be the computer chassis - it's doable but your looking at a good chunk of change for this |
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Quoted: The 20-40 was an estimate......maybe less, maybe more......and stuff that has been stored in CD's in the past number of years. Some of it went into storage pretty well ordered, such as the Dreyden Flight Center photo collection.....a lot of it didn't. But often at the time, it was put it on CD to make room on the tower's HD and I'll sort it later...................and we all know how that equation works. But even though CD's in a drawer are accessible, they still have to be put in a drive....and there is very little that one can write on the front of a CD. So unless one gets the exact CD, it can be tedious. Hence one of the reasons to transfer them back to HD, now that HD prices have come down. And, in the event of a HD failure........there are always the original CD drawers. ______________________________________________________________ ("But you've stored cell tissue to repeat the process again?"––the first clone looking on his aged donor body in horror "Provided the original is available.....,"––the doctor, (w,stte), "Forever and Amen" by Robert Bloch) It is probably a heck of a lot more than you realize. You're going to need to at least build a big RAID server to be able to redundantly store this stuff all in one place. This project is going to cost you thousands of dollars, not to mention time. |
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Well, point noted..............for the eventual.
But right now, I am still looking at processing directories of size 1 or 2 G at a time. Say, at the max, there may be 500 directories in one area. As far as what it may be eventually, when everything is accessable at once, that will certainly be more than a lap top.......for Project Sarah is an AI project beyond belief. But I'm not building Project Sarah right now.....I'm just working on the databases, an area at a time. __________________________________________________________________________ ("It has the external appearance of something from a very primitive society but I suspect that it is some kind of advanced travel capsule."––Soldeed about the TARDIS, (w,stte), Dr. Who "The Horns of Nimon") |