Storage-galore

When the new 2TB disks was announced in the news – I quickly started to look around to see if it would be possible to acquire an early order to test these out, and through some contacts in Europe I managed to get a hold of some early disks. I recieved the first 2TB disk on friday, and eagerly I looked forward to test it; sure – it’s not the fastest disk in the world – but those critics that use that as an argument, really need to think about what these disks really are meant to be used for. Such big disks are meant to be used either in archiving, or production mode for multimedia. In my case, it’s going to be used in archiving mode. Though there is one thing I can’t stress enough, if you do plan on building an archive with 2TB disks, you better make sure you set it up in RAID unless you want to loose your data when the first firmware bug appears. Yes – I say the first bug, because as we’ve seen lately with the Seagate scandal, and lack of ability to fix it quickly – one needs to be certain that you don’t put all your cards into one hat.

Here in Norway, you can already order the harddisks, and with a going price of NOK 2.350,- it’s not the cheapest disks around, but it certainly is the biggest. I myself set it up using Highpoint Rocketraid, and 2 disks in that raid have ran pretty nice since friday, and speed is quite nice; though you might want to keep in mind that when you’re starting to reach its full capacity, it does operate slower than most other disks. No wonder – as it’s double the size of other disks. Would I encourage others to buy them? Definitively. Would I encourage others to use them in an environment where data should not be lost? Definitively not. I would suggest that you’d wait at least 3-4 months before switching to these disks; merely because then it would have had time to be stress-tested in various environments, and others could find them bugs you don’t want to experience.

For the ordinary user I wouldn’t even consider using this as the primary disk. Merely because the ordinary user often doesn’t backup his/hers data, and thus when you earlier «only» lost 1TB of family pictures and videos, you can now loose considerably more. I would not encourage anyone to run such large disks as standalone disks; unless you’re very paranoid about backing up your data.