Re: Archival cost of hard drives

This is what I do.

In my experience on my HiPix, though, a movie is about 17GB/hr because it's
about 8.3GB/hr.

I gave up on D-VHS because of all the problems I had on my JVC 30k, which
were finally resolved by JVC's recall/update but by then I got used to
storing on HDD.

Couple of things:

1) If the drive dies you lose more than one movie
2) It is not the most convenient thing in the world to deal with.
3) I'm not really sure that the IDE connectors on drives are intended for
lots of re-plugs.

I initially planned to just buy a removable drive system and buy trays for
each drive, but I could never find one I liked.

There's a company called Wiebe Tech that makes a neat little FireWire
adapter just for this sort of purpose, though.  It plugs into the back of a
bare drive and provides power and a FireWire connection.  I haven't tried it
but it looks pretty slick.

At the moment, I just have two 250's in my FireWire 8-drive enclosure and
use this for all my HiPix recording...  Since I can't really record from
satellite, it gives me all the storage I need for weeks of saved-up HD, and
of course I can then stream to my HD1000 with StreamPlayer.

--Mike




> At the prospect of being able to archive HD content for future viewing,
> I was curious what the "cost per movie" would be to just buy extra hard
> drives and swap them out vs. archiving to DVHS tapes.
> 
> You can regularly purchase a 250Gb drive at Fry's for $99->$139
> depending on the current sale/rebate.
> 
> A 2 hour movie at broadcast bitrates would be about 14Gb.
> At satellite broadcast bitrates, it would be about 8-10Gb.
> 
> A 250Gb drive should hold about 16-28 movies, putting the cost at
> $4->$9 per movie (depending on bitrate and drive size).  That puts it
> in the same range as DVHS tapes.  Not a bad proposition.  Of course you
> need an enclosure (Firewire/USB2.0) that you can easily swap the drives
> in and out of or you have to add the price of an enclosure to each
> drive.
> 
> Just thought that was interesting.
> 
> --
> Steve Martin
> [email protected]
> 
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------
Mike Kobb
Senior Software Engineer, Roku
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