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Doesn't this cause problems at customs though? Aren't they curious to know what exactly it is you have stored on there taking into account the conservative nature of the regime etc?

Off topic, but I'll answer. Actually bringing movies into Saudi on a computer hard drive is much easier than bringing in the DVDs themselves. The customs officials ignore laptops and external HDDs, at least, in my 7 years here, I have never even heard of anyone having their computer searched. However, if a customs official sees DVDs or CDs when your baggage is X-rayed (yes EVERY piece of baggage belonging to everyone entering the country is x-rayed and usually searched upon entry) that's it, you are going to be held up for a long time while the customs official goes through every disc, every piece of paper, book, photo, dirty laundry etc in your luggage. I have colleagues that have had to wait over 12 hours while the customs officials scanned every DVD in their bag.

Now, which DVDs you are allowed to keep and which are confiscated is a lottery. It can be as arbitrary as Star Wars = OK, Return of the Jedi = no way. Why? Who knows..... Clearly, anything with bikini clad women running around is going to be confiscated as is your meticulously catalogued collection of 70's porn chic. Bringing such items into the country, and getting cought, will result in something like a $150 fine per film and your name being put onto some list. This has happened to a few colleagues of mine. One was his own fault, he was bringing in disc of porn. The other had simply fogotten about a few CDs with images in his computer bag, he knew what was on them, but simply forgot to take them out before he left New York. In this case, having a Mac actually saved him some expense, as some of the discs couldn't be opened on a Windows machine and no-one is Saudi has any idea about Macs so he just let them fiddle around for a while until they gave up. Same thing with HFS formatted external HDDs, Windows machines can't see them.

Ask anyone who has worked in Saudi and they can bore you for hours with stories of arbitrary and unexplicable confiscations by the customs officials. I have one student whi was returning from a summer vaction in the US who had is Physics text book confiscated. A photo lab refused to print some photos of my bosses newborn baby because the baby was naked. Just last week I was refused entry onto a Saudia domestic flight until I had changed out of my below knee length shorts into long trousers, they even held up the plane until I had done so. Just some of the trials of working in Saudi.


To be fair, over the time I have worked here, customs has relaxed a lot. Often you can simply be waved through now, after the x-ray.

As I said off topic. But hopefully a little interesting for some of you.
 
I'm planning to get two of the Hitachi drives and hook them up as a shared, mirrored drive for my home. This way we can store all our photographs, iMovie projects and what not in a way we all can share and access quickly. The mirror is to protect us in case one drive goes south. Probably I'll drive the whole thing with a Mac Mini. The drives will be in external Firewire boxes (I wish the Mini had FW800 instead of FW400) and we'll connect over Gigabit Ethernet. That means I'll have to upgrade the Asante switch.

I have no idea how to setup two drives in a mirror configuration with Firewire but I doubt it is hard. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Right now we probably have a few hundred GBs scattered on different HDs and DVDs. This will put everything in one place and make it easier to backup. Part of the reason for going to TB drives is that there will be lots of empty space. A backup drive is no good if it is full (or nearly so). If this lasts two years that will be great. At that time we'll replace them with 4TB drives or similar.

Attonine: thanks for the informative post.
 
. a few years ago people were wondering how someone could ever fill up that new 1GB HD, now 1GB isn't much space, the same thing will happen with 1TB drives in the near future.



A few years ago? A few is like 3-5....5 years ago the common harddrive wasn't 1Gb, maybe 10 years ago, but even then the iMac G3 had a 6Gb harddrive(althought that was more like 9 years ago!)

I don't think any time in the near future 1TB will be anything like 1Gb is...1TB can hold tons of stuff...few people have even close to this amount of stuff. I agree space needs will keep going up, but not to the point that 1TB will be like 1GB for a long long long time.
 
A few years ago? A few is like 3-5....5 years ago the common harddrive wasn't 1Gb, maybe 10 years ago, but even then the iMac G3 had a 6Gb harddrive(althought that was more like 9 years ago!)

I don't think any time in the near future 1TB will be anything like 1Gb is...1TB can hold tons of stuff...few people have even close to this amount of stuff. I agree space needs will keep going up, but not to the point that 1TB will be like 1GB for a long long long time.

Right now, music is what fills most peoples' HDs. As import quality for the majority increases towards lossless, this will become less important. When video becomes internet distributed in HD quality as the norm, that is when drive capacity will have to increase.

I think that the next revolution will not be 1TB in every laptop drive, but flash, and I hope that SSDs will be standard, cheap-ish and big enough to hold my music collection (and a wee bit o' video) by the time of my next upgrade :)
 
That's your computers at home, or your computers at work?

Home and work is rather fluid in my case. Although I do keep personal and business computing largely separated, nevertheless it all comes from the same funding source. The SAN in question keeps research data - and I do happen to be the only user of it.
 
And it's possible now almost cheaply too. 500GB's are downright affordable! 750's are also! When I was in college a 20MG HDD was considered huge! But now, well you know.

[My first MR post! :D ]

First off, a terabyte isn't that expensive anymore. About $300 (or was it $400?) for one from Iomega (RAID-0). I bought a WD 500GB for $225 a few months ago.

I bought one because I converted my CD collection over to Apple Lossless in iTunes. I think it works out to be 170GB just for music alone. I can see how it adds up if you have digital movies and stuff.

Oh... and my first "real" computer came with a 120MB drive and I remember the dealer (ZEOS) asking "why would anyone need that much space?!" (back in 1991).
 
Home and work is rather fluid in my case. Although I do keep personal and business computing largely separated, nevertheless it all comes from the same funding source. The SAN in question keeps research data - and I do happen to be the only user of it.
Maybe I should have asked, are those computers all located in your home?

On a side note, I almost added another 1.5 terabytes to my collection the other evening. A store that I frequent had 500GB IDE drives for about $120. I almost bought three but decided to wait a day. Bad decision. They were gone the next day!
 
Lacie 1 TB

Just ordered one on saturday, hasn't arrived yet. I am using it to store my large digtial photo collection (I am shooting with a Canon 5D) and I store a lot of video.
 
Hmmm...on one machine? I guess I have

iMac - 250gb
External 250gb
External 320gb
External 120gb
External 80gb

So that's over a TB right there

If we add in

the Mac mini 60
The Macbook 80
The PC - 200

It's over 1.25 lol
 
My :apple: MacBook only has 60GB hard disk space n up to now I only used half of it, 30GB. :D An external hard disk (60 to 100GB) will be good for backup purpose, but do we really need terrabyte hard disk? Well, maybe I just stored photos and document files (pdf, Words, Excel, Powerpoint, etc....) so it doesn't take up much space. That's why I don't need a terrabyte hard disk. Well, I believe we don't need a terrabyte hard disk.... yet, unless we are colleting dozens of DVD movies in our hard disk. Well, that's was just my opinion. It really depends on what you keep inside your hard disk. :)
 
First, my number:

NAS: custom built raid array: 8x400gb = 3200gb.
PB: internal:2x160gb = 320gb. external: 2x160gb + 2x80gb = 480gb. total = 800gb.
G4 Mini: internal: 1x80gb. external: 1x80gb. total = 160gb.
Emac: internal: 1x80gb. external: 1x80gb. total = 160gb.
CD Mini: internal: 1x80gb. external: 1x300gb. total = 380gb.

total: 4700gb. 4.7tb. (1mb = 1000000 bytes. 1gb = 1000mb. 1tb = 1000gb.)

All of this is at home. Mostly filled with music, video, dvd backups, and junk.

edit: Oh yeah, the raid array is striped, not mirrored. And I didn't count my offline backup of just the critical stuff.

Now, on to my question: How much data have you lost due to hardware/software failure of your raid array?
 
At work I had several problems with RAID arrays. Worst case was when one night 2 RAID 5's (each having 4x500Gb) had 2 drives fail at the same time! Both arrays were therefore worthless... Luckily one of the arrays was still in a test-phase so nothing important was lost. The other one had to be restored from a backup (disk-based as well).

Total nr. of Tb available is well over 10Tb, only counting shared storage on our network.

At home though, it's more like 500Gb spread across 4 machines... I'd love to have a file and mediaserver on my network after I move though.
 
I just got a terrabyte raid drive so it really is just 500GB of usable space, but this will probably only last 8 months. When I replace it I will probably have to go with an enclosure and put in 4 750 drives, that would last me a little while :)
 
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