I write about technology for a living, so I know how difficult it can be to make tricky techy subjects interesting to joe public. This movie does a great job in explaining the idea in a simple and fun way, and has generated a lot of interest in a technology that would otherwise pass most people by unnoticed. The movie and silly song explains the problem, the solution, and its benefits to the user, without requiring the viewer to understand what's inside a hard disk. There may be questions about product reliability and value, but I say well done Hitachi on this promo effort.

Forget about the new hard drive technology, what kind of drug technology have they come up with that made them churn out this animation?
http://hitachigst.com/hd...endicularAnimation.html

Don't know what a Tera-byte is? It Mega-Hurts :)

Seriously, the most inexpensive and reliable way to backup data is to backup to another hard drive (or drives), just don't buy the same drive at the same time, otherwise you may have two drives that could possibly fail around the same time. Even when using RAID 1, always try to use two identical drives but NEVER buy them on the same order! Same order = same batch = same assembly line = if one has a defect so does the other. Don't think it doesn't happen there are many, many batches of drives that have minor defects--often the manufacturer simply can't afford a recall so they keep it hush-hush. Then again if the drives are perfect it may be better to buy them all at once if you're "feelin' lucky"...

I love big cheap hard drives. That's why I already have a total of 1.65TB (consisting of one WD 250GB IDE, one Seagate 400GB IDE, and four Hitachi 250GB SATA).

But until last month, the WD's bay was occupied by a Maxtor. It died 3 weeks after the Maxtor warranty expired, and of course it was my system (boot) drive. Luckily, I've been backing up each drive weekly, so I didn't lose too much. The SATA drives get backed up on Mon-Thu nights and the IDE drives get backed up over the weekend.

But this kind of backup capability (LTO drive with robotic changer plus 2 rotations worth of media) cost me $3800 which is more than twice the cost of the hard drives, and this price was for refurbished hardware! Even at Ultra Wide SCSI speeds, each nightly backup takes many hours (sometimes running until morning if a drive becomes too fragmented).

At this point, the average Joe tries to tell me that I should back up to an extra set of IDE disks instead of tape. The problem is that the average Joe doesn't understand the value of rotation. You can't just repeatedly overwrite a single backup copy, especially if the backup process takes hours. What if the drive fails during the backup (which is a real possibility, given that the backup process exercises a drive thoroughly)? Suddenly you're left with a half-done backup which just overwrote your last good backup. To keep a minimal 2-set rotation, I would need another 3.3TB worth of hard disks. Theoretically, this wouldn't cost any more than my LTO library, but it's really impractical to actually hook up another 12 drives (making 18 drives total). Never mind how many bays a case supposedly has, or how many ports a controller card can supposedly support. There is no ideal solution for all the form factor, cabling, power, cooling, physical space, etc. issues. You can solve some of these with specialized backplane enclosures, but there are always issues remaining such as PCI slot/IRQ limitations.

And don't make me laugh by mentioning anything involving USB 2.0 or IEEE1394a/b (Firewire 400/800). Only IEEE1394b is truly fast enough to compete with Ultra Wide SCSI, and the dirty little secret about IEEE1394 is that there are reliability issues with most chipset implementations on both Mac and PC platforms which the manufacturers are denying/hiding. These are fine technologies for Grandma backing up her recipes or students carrying around a few hundred megs of MP3 files and term papers, but USB/IEEE1394 are not terabyte-class interfaces.

Normally, techniques like incremental and differential backup can help deal with time/capacity limits, but you still need to run full backups periodically as the baselines for the incr/diff backups. Since I'm already down to backing up each volume once per week (with no time/capacity left to add incr/diff for the other volumes), adding incr/diff to the scheme would require many more cartridges ($$$) and make the library export procedures more complicated to keep up with the rotation.

It's obviously an option to backup only the most critical data, but I've played that game before. It's easy to say you're willing to part with "non-critical" files...until the day you actually lose them forever. Nobody is EVER truly comfortable with ANY amount of data loss. Also, defining your "most critical" data is an accident waiting to happen. As soon as you select specific directories to include/exclude, you'll move things around later and create new directories but forget to update your backup selections.

When you get right down to it, SCSI-attached high-capacity tape technologies like LTO, SDLT, AIT3, and VXA-2 are the most cost-effective, time-effective, reliable, practical ways to backup. But tape technology has not been advancing as quickly as disk, and prices have not been falling as quickly. So when Hitachi releases a 1TB drive in 2007 for a few hundred dollars, it's still going to cost thousands of dollars for a decent backup solution, which means that 99.7% of people will not backup at all. Another 0.2% will make a weak attempt to backup portions of it (maybe every 3-4 months), and only 0.1% will be willing to spend the money and effort required for full protection.

Although I agree with you on the most part, there's a couple of points I'd like to make.

Given your worry is backup - FireWire IS a valid alternative for external HDD solutions, and if you can find some reliable caddies, so is USB. In fact external drive enclosures are a very cheap way of backing up ALL your data, and the limitations in transfer speeds are not relevant due to the fact it IS a backup, and is still a damn-sight faster than archaic tape options.

While there are benefits for rotation, as usual, backup solutions cost as much as the data is deemed to be worth. If you can afford to lose your data, you won't backup. If you can't, you'll pay the money. Have two or three sets of drives in hot swap RAID 1 is a good way to go - and using proper caddies only requires 4 of these 1TB drives to achieve your 1.43TB storage you current have, correct? Then you can have another 2 or 4 external to the machine, off-site for a very secure backup solution, without mucking around with unreliable tape systems.

So yes, backups are expensive, I see your point - but there ARE many ways around such an issue. And for the people who actually NEED to backup ALL that 1TB of data, they'll pay for it.

Hey Einstein you don't have to turn backing up data into rocket science. Simple if you have more than one drive just ghost the damn thing onto another partition weekly, forget about SCSI this and SATA that.. for those who don't want to shell out some here and there I suggest the cost effective way of backing up data so atleast you don't have to worry about, an array being broken (due to misconfiguration) or other SCSI, SATA related mishaps

Depending on who you ask the human brain has a storage capacity of 1 to 60 Terabytes. Will it be long before we can upload ourselves to a hardrive?

nice... can't wait till I can just have my hard-drive-copied-self do all my work while I sleep all day.

I'll wait till Seagate or Maxtor makes em' - cuz lord knows Hitachis are the new Deskstars (Deathstars). They die even more that Western Digitals.

The opinion of dying Western Digital drives is a bit dated. I have been using them for many years now without an issue arising. But then I appreciate that mentality -- it reduces the demand allowing supply to increase and gives me more purchasing power. Thanks. :-)

I agree-- esp. in these days of S.M.A.R.T. technology, i think a lot of brands are fairly equal. I put together systems & use interchangeably WD, Seagate, Maxtor-- whatever lowest price deal I can find in fact...

Have never used a Hitachi... I do notice that these days that company is at the very, very forefront of leading-edge technologies, partnering with IBM, Motorola, Sony... not only for those hard drives, but for the next cd technology(terabyte also), cell processor, multi-gig flash memory hardware, fast-charge battery.......

I only seem to have issues with Hitachi and sometimes Maxtor, but it isn't the brand that necessarily has the problem, it's the model. Those WDC- 4GB drives that were recalled were quite a mess, but even worse are the ones that work for 1 or 2 years before failing, the biggest nightmare drives being the Maxtor DiamondMax 20GB and 40GB drives (6E020L0 and 6E040l0...oddly the 30GB version 6E030L0 seems to be fine). No official recalls yet though many "special projects" have been setup for companies with hundreds of failures.

Now as far as SCSI drives go Maxtor seems fine, if not better, than the competition.

Bottom line, in my 12+ years of computer usage I have only had 1 HD die on me, and that was because I dropped it.

I guess I'm lucky, but things just don't die on me.

Gotta see it to believe it! That sure would be cool though!

This type of hard drive's been available in trials in Japan for a bit-- forget which brand-- Panasonic or Sony.....

We're on the cusp of revolutionary changes:

Terabyte cd's also...

That new IBM cell processor(Hitachi, Sony, Motorola? part of that consortium) mentioned in another article here is 'supposedly' the equivalent(or has the upgrade potential to equal) of 10 of today's processors....

Sun's development of stacking beacoup memory(such as a few dozen GB) or processors together w/ no need for a bus... can't wait......

10 terabyte to 10 petabyte holographic storage coming.

Colossal Storage will be able to hold 1,000 Hitachi perpendicular drives at a cost of $ .0004 a gigabyte with 10 terabyte data transfer rate !

I remember yeeeears ago I saw something on TV, a short tech bit, about Holographic storage. They showed a holographic disk that could store 400 Gigabytes of data. Keep in mind, this is back when (If I remember correctly) my computer had a spacious 3GB Hard Drive in it. The people on the show were discussing if and how a regualar computer user would really need that much space in the foreseeable future. Man, if only they had known then of the effect that creations by Shawn Fanning and DVD Jon would eventually have on our precious Hard Drive space.

The problem lies in extrapolating current technology and concluding that that kind of storage is excessive.

For instance, I've seen a camera that JPL is working on that can, with a minumum of two still shots, make 3D renderings. The more shots, the better the computer does at it, though. The pictures can be navigated like a typical 3D space. They're stunning, and the files are HUGE. It's for stuff like this that we're going to need much more storage capacity.

You can buy this type of external drive today from the PC Mall catalog or PC Mall.com and by the way I have 8 250G WD drives and they are great, been using them for years....

I think for most people DVD's will provide more than enough storage for the average user to back up their most important data.I have had hard drives fail, viruses that destroyed a lot of data, one that deleted all my MP3's. Sometimes I find that it helps me start over instead of having a bunch of old stuff on my computer that I don't use anymore.I think if people were more selective in their backups they could save a lot of money and a lot of time instead of backing up stuff that can be reinstalled with newer versions that are more reliable.