Tag: Data Storage

Tom’s Hardware has a review of Western Digital’s 200gb, 7200 RPM IDE drive.

At $399, the cost per gigabyte is a rather expensive $2/gig. As Tom’s Hardware notes, you could buy two 120 gigabyte hard drives for the same price (but then, of course, you have two drive bays devoted to just 20 percent more space).

Maxtor is shortly going to be selling a 320 gigabyte hard drive for $399. The only drawback is that it’s only 5400 RPM and, of course, there are still no good, cheap ways to back up hard drives that size (except by backing them up on second hard drives).

Western Digital is going to introduce 200 gigabyte IDE drives later this month. So much for last month’s round of “hard drive size increases will being to slow down” stories.

From a New York Times story on the general financial problems of hard drive manufacturers and the recent revival of HD maker Komag,

Moreover, it is still uncertain whether the rate at which storage density is increasing will slip from the staggering pace of recent years. The industry will introduce 60-gigabyte platters in July, and 80-gigabyte surfaces are expected by the end of the first quarter of 2003. Before the end of next year, Komag will almost certainly be shipping disk platters that can store 120 billion bytes of data each.

At some point, analysts and industry executives say, the pace of improvement in the industry will inevitably slow down, but those predictions are not new. For most of a decade, the disk-drive industry has defied technology limits as well as what many have viewed as financial common sense.

Is the demand for hard drive space really slowing down? I don’t think so.

One thing about hard drives is that as hard drive space increases, many applications that were always possible suddenly become much more feasible.

I could certainly use my computer today to store every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that becomes a lot more feasible if I can walk into a computer store and walk out with a 400 gig. hard drive for $300 — or buy a Tivo with a 400 gig HD.

Just as the increasingly large hard drives made MP3 file sharing possible (along with broadband), so I suspect ever huger hard drives will lead to wider adoption of similar technologies for video.

I.e. — Hollywood’s worst nightmare is only 18-24 months away.

No, really, I’m serious.

I back up the 10 gig or so of personal files on my hard drive with a program that writes them to 650 megabyte .ZIP files. Then I burn the .ZIP files to CD-Rs.

The problem is that now I have hundreds of CD-Rs of old backup sets that I no longer need. But I don’t want to just toss them into the trash because they are plain old unencrypted .ZIP files that could end up in the hands of my enemies (FNORD).

So I’m trying to find a reliable method to quickly render CD-Rs unreadable on casual use (if the CIA really wants to capture my data they’re going to — I just want to make sure the geek down the street couldn’t pilfer my trash and recover the data).

Any ideas?

Harvard Business School has an excerpt from Bryan Bergeron’s book, Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die about the problem of digital data loss. I’ve been avoiding Bergeron’s book because, frankly, it seems rather alarmist (Bergeron suggests, for example, that data loss problems could threaten the very structure of modern civilizations). The HBS excerpt, however, focuses on risk management for data loss issues.

A lot of the concern over data loss is obviously geared toward companies, but it is increasingly a problem for individuals as well. Bergeron notes that he had to buy a used Commodore 64 to retrieve a program that he wrote in the 1980s. I had a similar probably in the early 1990s when I discovered a stack of Apple II disks filled with word processing documents that were stored in a proprietary format. I had to sneak into a computer lab late at night, pop the hood on the remaining Apple II and reconfigure it just to be able to print out the files and then OCR them. Talk about a pain in the butt.

My data management problem is now much larger since the “My Documents” folder on my PC consumes about 8 gigabytes of hard drive space (and that’s excluding all of the photos and MP3s).

Bergeron has a pretty through look at managing the risk of data loss for companies. From a personal perspective, I am very concerned about data that is stored in applications that may not exist or be executable in a decade or so from now. For that reason I try to make sure that the documents I create are stored in widely available formats.

Everything I write, for example, is stored in plain text ASCII files. I use a number of programs for a variety of purposes that use proprietary file formats, but I convert everything to JPEG and GIFs and similar formats when I am finished with a project.

This also makes it a lot easier to retrieve information when I need it, since almost all applications can handle those formats.

Another thing I’ve done recently is switch to a program called Zip Backup for backups. With Zip Backup, I highlight the various folders that I want backed up and then it creates 650 megabyte Zip files (or however large I specify) which it writes to a hard drive I specify and then I write the Zip files to CD. This also means I can access the backup archives on any machine that supports both CD-ROM and the Zip format (more than once I have had serious problems finding the software to restore old backup archives). Not bad for only $19.