jmke

The manufacturing roadmaps for SSD storage devices should enable three to four bits per MCL cell in late 2011 or early 2012 and this should be the point when SSD should catch up mechanical HDD drives in storage and price.The performance is already on SSD side. This is why Intel as well as OCZ are putting a lot of effort into this market as if this turns to be right, mechanical drives might become history in the next five to ten years.

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15811/38/

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jmke

I'm still looking for a low cost; very low fail-rate, and always online storage medium which is mainly used for READ performance. HDDs are currently doing this job, but they end up breaking and taking all the data stored on them with them

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jmke

personal data stored offsite and pay for every gigabyte transferred, and go from 1Gbit connection to a <10mbit... no thanks

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Oberon

Isn't that why we have RAID systems? Sure, you take a small hit in the "low cost" category if you build a decently performing and truly fault tolerant setup, but it does satisfy the rest of the needs fairly well.

jmke

not quite in my humble opinion; low cost raid also means low fault tolerance and low cost raid chips have a tendency to crap out on you, taking all your data with them. really low cost unlimited storage >100Tb is not yet for today, and I wouldn't want to power/maintain such a unit with the current HDDs/SSDs we have available.

5x20Tb storage drives with zero moving parts would be a future to look forward to


@koensa: that's still 10x slower than local network AND you have not addressed any of the other issues involved with "the cloud"

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Kougar

To follow Oberon's comment, that's why we have good quality NAS solutions. Can set up any RAID type you please, low power consumption, and less risky than using Intel's Matrix RAID. In my opinion the best route is to keep the RAID array separate from the PC using a good quality NAS.

The better quality NAS's out there today will yield amazing performance, up to 40-80MB/s RAID 5 read/write performance over a 1 Gigabit network.

100mbit/s is 12.5MB/s... not very fast! HDD can reach 120MB/s or better.

Also JMke is referring to those broadband internet users limited by bandwidth caps... would spent much of his bandwidth quota by uploading or downloading to/from online storage.

jmke

Look up some prices of 1Gbit capable NAS devices, you might be surprised... not very affordable

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Kougar

Is a balance between low cost and reliability, in this case I think the protection a RAID 1 or RAID 5 NAS offers is well worth the cost of investment.

That said, I've seen them as low as $150, such as this one. I would recommend QNAP's products myself, but they will obviously cost more.

Going the WHS or Linux route is fine, but the cost of a mini-ITX setup wouldn't save much.

jmke

QNAP is immensely expensive and at $150 you'll get a unit that will get 10-15mb/s max transfer speeds over Gigabit.

that Intel unit is quite unique, basically a mini PC

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Kougar

That's what a NAS pretty much is. 10-15MB/s sounds reasonable, will depend on the processor in question.

QNAP is expensive, but there are others. Rosewill and other brands have advertised far cheaper units... this one is not a "true" NAS, but this was advertised for $150 free shipping with an included Rosewill eSATA card during their last shell shocker sale.

NAS's might be expensive, but the cost of building a mini-ITX NAS adds up to almost the same... using an older desktop instead is cheap, but runs up the power bill if desiring always-on access, and the user needs to understand linux or buy WHS to configure it properly and securely. I'm happy with QNAP's firmware as I can allow specific remote access accounts/connection types while still protecting my data elsewhere on the device.