Hi Keith,

My eldest son Tom is 'into' computers more than me..so I showed him your
post. Here's his reply:

if you have the space in your PC case, it'd be worth considering a raid
card:
http://www.promise.com/product/produ...=94&familyId=2

And a few disks:
http://www.storagereview.com/article...5VLSA80_1.html

This put's all the drives together as a single volume (drive letter) and
different Raid levels give advantages of performance and redundancy,
depending on how it's set up.

Tom

"Keith G" wrote in message
...

Having accumulated nearly half a terabyte of, er, 'audiovisual' material
since Christmas, I'm running out of room fast (I need to stack a certain
amount on the HDD for editing before burning off to DVDR/RW) - at the risk
of appearing too idle to start the rounds myself, is anyone here 'au
courant' with the best online deals atm?

I'm looking at the best price/size combination at the 200-250 GB break and
also interested in what's available at bigger capacities (500 Gig?)

TIA

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 12:49:22 -0000, Keith G wrote:


"Fleetie" wrote in message
...
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118

4 250GB drives in a small, hot box.


Interesting observation, but this gadget is way over my budget anyway. It
does raise the interesting possibility of a USB/Firewire 'standalone'
mass
storage bank. (Which, in turn, raises the spectre of a gadget failing
with a
TB's worth of blood, sweat and toil going doon the toobs.......)

The more discs you have the more likely failure becomes, and the more sense
some redundancy makes. Some kind of RAID5 controller might be a good idea.
With n drives you'd get the same space as n-1, but if one fails you don't
loose any data.

Thanks to all who responded here - the links and suggestions are most
helpful. Apparently I've got to check that the motherboards on
both/either
of my machines (both running XP) will actually 'see' 200-250 Gig disks
and
not report them as having smaller capacities.....??

--
Jim H jh
@333
.org

"Mike Gilmour" wrote in message
...
Hi Keith,

My eldest son Tom is 'into' computers more than me..so I showed him your
post. Here's his reply:

if you have the space in your PC case, it'd be worth considering a raid
card:

http://www.promise.com/product/produ...=94&familyId=2

And a few disks:

http://www.storagereview.com/article...5VLSA80_1.html

This put's all the drives together as a single volume (drive letter) and
different Raid levels give advantages of performance and redundancy,
depending on how it's set up.



Hi Mike - thanks for this, I know a nice little 'RAID array' is the 'cool'
approach atm! This and the possibility of an external box are certainly
going under consideration for the near future, but right now I'm just
looking for a little extra space to 'lay over' rips and recordings for
editing purposes.

The truth is that there are far more interesting movies on the Freeview
channels these days than there are decent new releases. What I like to do is
record them them to disk using a Panasonic DVDR - a sluggish operator with
evil -R/RAM 'compatability' but an infallible producer of perfect digital
recordings and which has the *essential* Time Slip and Flexible Recording
modes.

I then copy them to hard disk and do the necessary tidying up - 'top and
tail' them (always pays to add a few minutes to the start and end times) and
remove any ads - *not* a chore when the black stuff is spinning close by!
They then get burned to an R or RW according to their 'keepability' atm -
the extra space will allow me to rack more of them up. (You are talking of
an average of two movies a day, I would say...!)

(We like to 'control time' when we watch a move - usually 'fridging' before
the opening credits have finished, pausing for various things - fag breaks,
make tea or coffee etc., pause and zoom those 'important little clues' and
then there's the inevitable *Run that back*....!!!)

When it comes to 'safety backup copies' of other movies there is often a
fair bit of buggering about to do like removing Icelandic subtitles and
other excess baggage to reduce the amount of compression required to best
fit the movie onto the 4.38 Gig real capacity of a blank disk.....

:-)

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 14:58:46 -0000
"Mike Gilmour" wrote:


And a few disks:
http://www.storagereview.com/article...5VLSA80_1.html

Oh dear god no. not IBM discs.


--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with ketchup.

"just me" wrote in message
news

4 250GB drives in a small, hot box.


Interesting observation, but this gadget is way over my budget anyway.
It
does raise the interesting possibility of a USB/Firewire 'standalone'
mass
storage bank. (Which, in turn, raises the spectre of a gadget failing
with
a
TB's worth of blood, sweat and toil going doon the toobs.......)

Thanks to all who responded here - the links and suggestions are most
helpful. Apparently I've got to check that the motherboards on
both/either
of my machines (both running XP) will actually 'see' 200-250 Gig disks
and
not report them as having smaller capacities.....??

Over recent years my HD capacity has increased to a couple TB, buying
another disc every couple of months.

I've found cheap prices at Micro Direct (www.microdirect.co.uk) - a little
over 50p/GB for Maxtor 7200rpm with 8GB cache at 160GB/disc, and they're
local to me which is handy. I know it's easier to use larger discs, but if
you can keep the drives smaller and well organised, if you experience a
failure, you will find less material is lost and you know roughly what you
have to reaquire.

I haven't bothered with a custom box for it all (although I am thinking
about it) as I've found networked PCs quite easy to arrange and browse. A
Lian-Li P60 case, for instance, will hold up to 12 hard discs with ease
and
yet is a normal-sized PC case. It looks good, has effecient and quiet
cooling and easier than many standard PC cases when adding/removing
drives.
It's easy to add additional IDE channels with £20 PCI cards.

As for large disc support, go to www.maxtor.com and look for the "Enable
Large Disc Support Utility" (of something like that). It's a simple
executable which updates the Windows registry to recognise drives over
127GB - most of the solutions I found on Google when I first had this
problem were long and unneccessary - this is simple and works.



Excellent - thanks for that. (Probably saved me a ton of dicking around!)


Then set up an FTP server and give me access!


No, bugger that for a 'jeu des soldats'......



Piece of pie!

(Me like pie).


........so do I.

Email me direct (with a real name) for a 'Pie List' (embryonic Office 97
..xls or a cut & paste therefrom) and a list of any 'pies' you have...... ;-)


(I think you've coined a global Internet phrase here.......!! ;-)

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 16:23:24 +0000, Ian Molton wrote:

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 14:58:46 -0000
"Mike Gilmour" wrote:


And a few disks:
http://www.storagereview.com/article...5VLSA80_1.html

Oh dear god no. not IBM discs.

You had problems with them? It's been a while admittedly, but I used
to favour them a few years back, mostly for being quiet and reliable.

As I'm about to build a modest array I'm interested in recent
experiences. For my application speed is not a big issue, but
reliability and noise is.


--
Tim Hobbs

Barcoding? http://www.bartec-systems.com
Land Rovers? http://www.seriesii.co.uk

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 16:43:16 +0000
Tim Hobbs wrote:


http://www.storagereview.com/article...DS722525VLSA80
_1.html

Oh dear god no. not IBM discs.

You had problems with them? It's been a while admittedly, but I used
to favour them a few years back, mostly for being quiet and reliable.

Lets just say its no co-incidence that IBM sold out to hitachi
immediately after sellign some of the least reliable drives in modern
times...


--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with
ketchup.

"Ian Molton" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 16:43:16 +0000
Tim Hobbs wrote:


http://www.storagereview.com/article...DS722525VLSA80
_1.html

Oh dear god no. not IBM discs.

You had problems with them? It's been a while admittedly, but I used
to favour them a few years back, mostly for being quiet and reliable.

Lets just say its no co-incidence that IBM sold out to hitachi
immediately after sellign some of the least reliable drives in modern
times...


--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with
ketchup.

What about now though under Hitachi Global Storage Technologies ..any
better??

Hi,

In message , Ian Molton
writes

Lets just say its no co-incidence that IBM sold out to hitachi
immediately after sellign some of the least reliable drives in modern
times...

It's funny, I heard *lots* of first hand reports of failures and
problems with IBM drives (Deskstar 540x, around 60GB if memory serves,
but I could be wrong). I never actually saw one fail, despite using
quite a few. The worst drives I've personally ever used were Hitachi
SCSI units. I had three 1.4GB drives, back when that was huge by most
standards, and they all failed within weeks.

I got one back from a warranty claim with really bad hand-soldered mods
on it. I swore I'd never buy one again, and at the time I worked for
Hitachi and got a staff discount.

I'll probably steer clear, now that the two makers I trust least have
joined forces!
--
Regards,
Glenn Booth

"Glenn Booth" wrote in message
...
Hi,

In message , Ian Molton
writes

Lets just say its no co-incidence that IBM sold out to hitachi
immediately after sellign some of the least reliable drives in modern
times...

It's funny, I heard *lots* of first hand reports of failures and
problems with IBM drives (Deskstar 540x, around 60GB if memory serves,
but I could be wrong).



Now that you mention it, I've had 2 hard disks fail on a leased Dell (at the
rate of about one per year) - replaced without question (as was the
motherboard on one occasion - unnecessarily as it turned out). I reckon
these were both IBM Deskstars.......