Check these leaked roadmaps that show Western Digital's plans for its NAS-optimized Red and energy-efficient Green hard drive lineups. The slides reveal that we can expect the first 5TB HDDs about a... 5TB HDDs in the pipeline
Ive got a 1TB in my PC and a 1TB in my server and ive still got 1TB between them to spare! 5TB drive would last me.. well forever!
I'm pretty surprised that I managed to make it through most of the artificial price inflation with just 1 spare 2TB drive (on top of what I had before). I thought I'd run out of space for sure and have to end up paying a ridiculous 2-3x an HDDs previous cost when at the moment there was no shortage. I still have a few hundred gigs to spare so I'll be waiting for prices to go down again before I buy anything. Last I checked prices were still towards double normal, they only went down to normal on Black Friday, and I had no car at the time so I couldn't even pick up anything (no I'm not about to spend 4 hours waiting and on buses for a trip that's about 50 minutes by car).
Err.. About 17TB unformatted. 2TB free now, so will have to do something about it over the holidays. Problem is I'm out of SATA ports again, so I'll have to get another controller too. WD has 4TB models as well, just not GP drives (Black and RE).
Damn. And here I thought I had alot of storage space. :nerd: I have 10TB so far and it slowing keeps adding up month after month.
as soon as the 5tb are out, i'm going to buy 2, i need (and prefer) 2 big drives rather than 4 smaller ones, money no object.
Ebuyer has an external 4TB Hitachi on USB 3 for only £130 !! http://www.ebuyer.com/339426-hitachi-4tb-touro-dx3-desktop-hard-drive-0s03400 I dont get it, USB 3 external drives have no price premium over bare drives.
I noticed this as well. I grabbed me a 1TB Buffalo external from Tesco about 2 months ago for £55 (Has a WD Green drive in it) At the time a 1TB internal drive was around £80
USB 2.0 drives even used to be cheaper than bare SATA drives. I bought a bunch I pried open and took the drives out of. I now have a lot of SATA -> USB 2.0 converters and AC adapters left over from this.
It's really nothing too fancy or complicated. Mostly older hardware (Core 2, P35 chipset etc), an extra controller, an old, huge huge slightly modified maxi-tower from way back with room for boatloads of drives. Running Windows Home Server 2011 and FlexRaid software raid (Raid-Z, 3TB parity and storage pooling). Streams to my Popcorn Hour media player in the living room with a full graphical library system (ala XBMC). It's positioned in a storage room in my apartment and I control it with Radmin. I easily get over 100 megabytes a sec over Gb Lan with this. A cheaper and much more flexible alternative to a NAS. Easy peasy. Put that old hardware to use! A pic of the thing can be seen here: http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/jj28/Adrgha/CIMG5809.jpg It ain't pretty, but I never see it anyway.