It is the latest/greatest and you'll pay a premium for that.

I know that... but this high?? If so: bring on the 4TB drives!

1TB drives apparently cost $400 when they debuted - according to the article on Engadget anyway.

Yeah, I know, I know... but I've been waiting a long time for larger drives than 2TB to show up. I was hoping for a better price point, somting like $180 or something. It also took the manufacturers longer than usual to come up with larger drives. 2TB has been the maximum size for about two years now I'm guessing, so I don't really want to wait a whole lot longer for the price to go down for these drives. Guess I'll have to bite the bullet then..

You gotta be kidding me!

I remember how exciting it was when the price of hard drive storage dropped down to just one dollar per megabyte. Now the "premium" price is .008 cents (that's eight one-thousandths of a penny!) per megabyte. If you factor in inflation (i.e., the loss of value to the dollar) since those heady dollar-per-megabyte days, the cost of storage back then was about 20,000 times higher than it is now.

Count your blessings!

tanstaafl.

That's not really a fair comparison, this holds true for almost everything. If you bought a car twenty years ago and you buy one now, for the same amount of your money's worth, you will receive more than you did back then.

And a good thing, otherwise there would be no innovation at all.

I've just checked. I can buy a Samsung 2TB drive for €75. This new WD 3TB drive costs €240. While I understand the idea behind the latest and greatest, I really think the difference in this case is a bit too big. (but I'll pay it, nonetheless. )

Then, obviously the difference is NOT too big.

Digging up this older thread again because things have changed a bit (again :))

Mark, what is your stance of Hitachi HD's? I know they were pretty good in the IBM days (until the Deathstar debacle), but how are they now? Reason I'm asking is because it seems that Hitachi has quietly released their 3TB 7K3000 Deskstar HD, and initial reviews seem to be pretty good.

Prices of 3TB HD's have finally started to drop a bit, too. As far as I know, there are now 3 manufacturers offering a 3TB drive: Western Digital, Seagate (bleh!) and now Hitachi. I'm still waiting for Samsung to release theirs to be honest though, but maybe this Hitachi drive isn't that bad also: 5 platters instead of 4 compared to the other two brands, but also pretty fast, 7200RPM and 64MB cache.

Yes, I was looking at the Hitachi 3TB as well.
It ais almost time for me to upgrade my home server, and I am starting to consider 2x3TB.

Very well engineered yet unreliable junk.

Now, ask me how I really feel about them.

Two years ago, I received four very new, very modern Hitachi drives. These have been used very sparingly, and yet three of the four are now dead.

I am sooo glad I didn't pay any money for them.

Meanwhile, yesterday I purchased yet another 2TB WD "Green" drive for use here. Love those, despite the stupid default behaviour.

Cheers

Ok, that's quite clear!
Let me rephrase my former comment then!

"As far as I know, there are now 3 manufacturers offering a 3TB drive: Western Digital, Seagate (bleh!) and now Hitachi (BLEH!) . I'm still waiting for Samsung to release theirs! (oh yes!)"

Thanks for your input Mark, I think I'll wait just a little bit longer, or get me another WD drive..

Around here, I can purchase two three WD 2TB "Green" drives for less than about the cost of a single WD 3TB drive.

Cheers

I know, it's the same here.
But one 2TB drive will not hold all my stuff. A single 3TB drive would, so that's why I'm interested in buying two. (one to work with and one for backup use) I'll wait just a little longer though. I'm really hoping Samsung will release a 3TB drive soon. Samsung has a knack for releasing drives that are cheaper than most other brands, but can compete with WDC in terms of speed and quality. Usually, when a Samsung drive is released, the others start dropping in price as well.

So buy two.

Hi,

The WD Green 2TB drives are still hanging in there.

I recently (last week) had downloaded 355GB in 3 large sets of database from one (that has 1.8TB of data on it) to a player for a test. The loads were 77GB, 93GB, and and 185GB each.

Not a problem for the 2TB drives or the player drives. For more information, see the 250GB thread and the Windows 7 64Bit crashes emplode thread on the BBS.

It took "days" of access to the drive. I know it isn't recommended, but the 2, 250GB drives in the player are getting old and I controlled the environment very carefully, it's all in the threads.


I am purchasing 2 more WD 2TB today for back-up, plus a 500GB WD SATA laptop drive to work through SATA drives for the Empegs.

Ross

Maybe it's time we respun the empeg images to mount/access music over the network rather than from local storage?

Oh, but we did. We called it the Receiver Edition. We also made sure that it could deal with arbitrarily large databases, bigger than would ever fit in a player's own memory. The down-side, of course, is that it requires the network server to be available in order to do anything.

Peter

Wouldn't that take all of the fun out of this? <grin>

Ross

Hi,

By the way, I purchased 2 ea WD 2TB WD20EARS drives locally and opted to order a WD 1TB Laptop drive for the Empeg.

One of the 2TB drives is backing up one of the system drives in my simulation system right now.


The Laptop drive is a WD SATA and is 12.5mm high. It should fit into the player fine. It should be here early next week.

Let the fun begin...

Ross

Hmm. Sounds like a job for a more modern embedded linux box plugged into the empeg's ethernet port

I can't remember... were the car semantics still preserved in the receiver edition?

I want one drive to hold all of my stuff, and I don't want to use RAID. Call me picky.

I suppose those don't come as IDE anymore? So I'm guessing you're using some kind of SATA to IDE converter? Which one if I may ask? How do you fit that into the empeg? (the secondary drive bay most likely?)

Mostly, but not bookmarks, Wendy filters, biased (parametric) shuffle, or the search screens. Though it does have soup menus, which reduce the need for the search screens.

Peter

Actually if you wanted to do it in-car that would be the way to go. Plus, as Mark suggests, NFS music storage or indeed full NFS diskless boot. You'd either need to fit the "more modern embedded linux box" internally, or arrange to dock the ethernet somehow. And you'd probably need to use SSD, as the server wouldn't see the Empeg's drive-spindown commands.

Peter

[dream]
Ah.. MK3...
[/dream]

At the point of starting to develop custom hardware, IMO it's a better idea to connect storage to an iPhone or iPod touch or iPad and write a brand new player app for iOS.

Prices dropped here too. I did not realize that. You can easily find such units at € 77 each. That's very very nice.

Someone needs to knockup a Bluetooth board with a rotary encoder and 4 or 5 buttons. That an an iOS app.

And put that BT remote onto the steering wheel. Sounds nice. I'm pretty sure I could easily have such a device made. That's not the hard part. The hard part is still the player software.

Otherwise we're left with the player software that already exists, and as we've covered in other threads, it's not all that great.

Now that this is out there... If anyone wanted to SERIOUSLY consider writing a really great music player app for iOS, I'd be willing to partner up on this, contributing both design and capital investment. Hardware doodads could easily be looked at once the software is well enough along.

The thing is, I wouldn't want an in car iOS app that didn't make use of the add on hardware. I don't want to have to touch the screen at all to use it.

Whether you'd ever get an app like that approved by Apple seems worryingly unlikely. And it is an awful lot of effort to go to only to get it turned down

And I'd never want a remote like that on my steering wheel, but that comes down to personal choice