Hitachi has now released a 1TB SATAII 32MB cache HDD.

Hitachi 7K1000 drive

HD charts here
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Very nice. That would explain why the 500GB and 750GB drives have recently dropped in price.

They mention that Seagate are also readying one for release soon, so I'm going to wait until that is on the market before even considering such a purchase. A 1TB drive is extremely tempting though, but it will depend on the price which I expect to be high to begin with and then drop off in a couple of months.
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A 1TB HDD is too risky, if that one fails, you're really screwed. I'd prefer to buy 4*300GB or even 6*200 disks and configure them into a Raid 5, getting also almost 1TB. Only disadvantage is the place where to put the disks.
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Plus the power consumption, heat generated and noise of a lot of drives in a cluster.

I agree that a single 1TB HD is very risky if it did suddenly die. But that is only if you are using it to store the only copy of data. I personally have everything backed up to DVD-R as well as on the HD so it is not such an issue if the drive did fail, all be it a big job to copy all of the files back onto a replacement drive.

Of course the solution to that problem is to buy two 1TB drives and set them up as a mirrored RAID array. Not quite a robust or secure as a RAID5 array, but cheaper than having to buy 3x 1TB drives. Although think of the space you would have with such a RAID5 setup.

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That's probably a good idea, but always backing up to DVDs takes a lot of time. And putting it back even more. I'll stick with external drives for backups.
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I backup from one hd to another but as they are in the same tower, I backup to dvd as well.
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Me too sometimes, but we're talking here about 500GB of files and more. Will have to wait for Blu-Ray to be affordable.
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500GB only takes about 120 DVD-R's so the cost is little more than a single 100 disc spindle pack. I would rather be safe than sorry.

But I do agree, the sooner blu-ray or HD-DVD burners and their media come down to affordable and more mainstream prices the better. Fitting 50GB per disc would mean just 10 discs for 500GB which is much more manageable.

Anyone got any ideas on when writable HD-DVD is coming? I've been hearing romours of 90GB per disc but have nothing to confirm that. I've also heard that it will be a more robust format than Blu-Ray, much like the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R. And I've also heard some uncomfirmed reports that the data layer on blu-ray discs is very close to the surface and easily damaged. Not so good if that is the case.
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I did not speak about the costs, as that doesn't matter in this case. But I'm talking of the time to fill the 120 discs.
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That is true. But only really if you had to back the lot up in one go. I tend to back things up as I download each collection, so it doesn't take that long each time.

Obviously if you had to burn 120 DVD-R's, going on an average of 4 minutes per disc it would take 10 hours! But more realistically it would take longer per disc due to needing to sort the files for each disc and queuing up the discs.
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