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How many of you guys will use even half of that harddrive space before the drive dies?

*raises hand*

Considering I filled ~6TB in the last 6 months with footage for work.

Come on BLACK! I need to rebuild my array in a serious way and 4 x 3 would sqeeze out 3 more GBs. Not to mention I would have a bunch of 2TB bare drives to store backups on. Come on BLACK!
 
Is interface speed keeping up with external sizes?

How long would it take to do a plain old write of 6GB to an external drive?

Don't get me wrong, larger externals are great and definitely needed, but I think we're going to see more and more of this stuff hosted from the cloud since backing up and writing to these standard drives gigs and gigs of data is going to eventually be detrimental...perhaps too slow to do it effectively.

Of course the cloud will require higher bandwidth for all...etc.

If backing up a full 6GB drive will take 36 hours (just throwing that number out there...I don't know), there's got to be a better way.:(
 
If backing up a full 6GB drive will take 36 hours (just throwing that number out there...I don't know), there's got to be a better way.:(

36 hours?

I need 52 seconds with eSATA II and it only takes that long because of the slow eSATA card.
 
Is interface speed keeping up with external sizes?

How long would it take to do a plain old write of 6GB to an external drive?

Don't get me wrong, larger externals are great and definitely needed, but I think we're going to see more and more of this stuff hosted from the cloud since backing up and writing to these standard drives gigs and gigs of data is going to eventually be detrimental...perhaps too slow to do it effectively.

Of course the cloud will require higher bandwidth for all...etc.

If backing up a full 6GB drive will take 36 hours (just throwing that number out there...I don't know), there's got to be a better way.:(

USB 2.0 does about 35MB/s in real life so if it's writing constantly @35MB/s, it would take less than 3 minutes to backup 6GB.

FireWire 800 does about 80MB/s in real life so with it, it would take only 1 minute and 15 seconds to backup 6GB.

With other interfaces [USB 3.0, (e)SATA], the hard drive speed is the limit.

If you meant 6TB instead of 6GB, just multiply those numbers by 1000 (47.6 hours with USB 2.0 and 20.8 hours with FW800).

These numbers are just theoretical and the real world bandwidth may vary
 
Thanks everyone for the speedy responses.


I guess, looking back, I meant 6TB. Sorry...

I know that my first backup for Time Machine took about 10 hours for something like 750GB.

Wondering out loud how larger and larger drives would fare.

Thanks Hellhammer...48 hours is really pushing it for usability, no? Surely 10TB isn't far down the road...3-5 years? Will we see/need a new interface?
 
Thanks Hellhammer...48 hours is really pushing it for usability, no? Surely 10TB isn't far down the road...3-5 years? Will we see/need a new interface?

It's not the interface that is the bottleneck - 6Gbps is already available - it's the physical read/write speeds of traditional mechanical hard drives. That's going to be a tough problem to crack, as things haven't changed all that much in that department over the last decade. I assume that most people move data a little bit at a time under most circumstances, but you're right - if you want to fill one of those drives continuously from scratch, it will take a very long time.
 
How many of you guys will use even half of that harddrive space before the drive dies?

Um, I've got 45TB...in my HOUSE.

16TB Drobo Pro
10TB DroboS
8TB Drobo
4TB WD MyBook
2x2TB drives in a dock
1TB notebook drive
750GB internal MBP drive
160GB internal MBP drive
2TB external quad interface
1TB iMac drive
etc

most are almost full...doesn't take much when you work in film/television
 
It's not the interface that is the bottleneck - 6Gbps is already available - it's the physical read/write speeds of traditional mechanical hard drives. That's going to be a tough problem to crack, as things haven't changed all that much in that department over the last decade. I assume that most people move data a little bit at a time under most circumstances, but you're right - if you want to fill one of those drives continuously from scratch, it will take a very long time.

I guess that's what I am getting at...that current read/write technology isn't really keeping up with the size of the drives. Sure, this is currently only an issue backing-up or restoring, but it's an issue nonetheless.
 
Thanks Hellhammer...48 hours is really pushing it for usability, no? Surely 10TB isn't far down the road...3-5 years? Will we see/need a new interface?

How often do you backup or transfer 6TB of data? I bet you don't do that very often. The first backup always takes more time but incremental backups are unlikely to be more than few GBs, depends how much new data you download/transfer everyday. Even if you had 100GB to backup, it shouldn't take much more than an hour with USB 2.0, less than 30mins with FW800 (again, theoretically).
 
I guess that's what I am getting at...that current read/write technology isn't really keeping up with the size of the drives. Sure, this is currently only an issue backing-up or restoring, but it's an issue nonetheless.

Agreed, although looking at that Anand article, I was a bit surprised to see that the two drives had sequential read/write rates of between 120-160 megabytes per second via usb 3. That's a bit faster than I was expecting they'd do - and at that rate they could do 500GB an hour or so, which is fairly reasonable, even to move many terabytes. I suppose the increased speeds must come from the parallelism that is possible by adding additional platters. If that's the case, then drives will continue to get proportionally faster as they get bigger, and it won't be an issue - and that's assuming there are no more advancements, which there will be. Of course those numbers are sequential, no telling what real-world performance when moving hundreds of thousands of individual files.
 
Sweet! I've got about 150 GB left on my 1.5 TB drive, and my secondary 500 GB drive is full D:
 
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