Hitachi (who merged their harddrive business with IBM a while ago) announced a new 400GB, 3.5″ drive. The previous heavyweight was around 300GB, so this isn’t a huge leap, but it’s still something.
So, I thought to myself: how would you archive that drive? You know, back it up?
Travan makes DAT (digital analog tape) drives. Their largest drive seems to be a 40GB tape. So, assuming you get good compression on your data (meaning you’re not trying to store pictures, moves, and audio), you could get away with as few as five or six tapes to backup a whole disk. If you’ve got a lot of audio and video, you’re going to have to use as many as ten tapes to do your backup. And it is slow.
There are two problems on the horizon, and some of us are already hitting them:
- The “personal data warehousing” problem, and
- Archiving.
The first problem relates to how we keep track of all our stuff. I have email going back for years, but no effective way to store and search it. I have PDFs of papers I’ve collected over the years, but no way of searching them for information. I’ve got text and Word documents galore that I’ve written, but … you get the picture? I have all this data, and no way to use it. In short, I need Google on my harddrive.
Then, we have the problem of backing up our stuff. My mother has this problem already: she has 6GB of photos in her iPhoto library. That doesn’t even fit on one DVD! Likewise, I have CDs going back for years, but again—the media will fail someday, and besides, as harddrives get bigger, and I accumulate more data, it’s hard to store it and keep it archived in case of snafu or drive failure.
In short, we’re all going to need redundant, live storage solutions. Instead of buying one 400GB disk, I need five 200GB drives arranged into a RAID5 array; this way, if one drive fails, I just slip a new one in, and there’s no loss of data. Inside of ten years, I expect there will be consumer-level disk arrays that are designed to be plugged in and used without any expertise. We’re seeing the start of this with network attached storage, but soon it will hit the consumer market full-on.
But, for the moment, I wouldn’t mind more drive space so I could sort out the 40 to 60 CDs I’ve made over the last few years (data backups from several machines and accounts) and get them organized. In short, attempt to start tackling problem #1, at least personally. Anyone want to buy me a 400GB drive?