Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Akiba Trends: Stack up, then stack up some more

I’ve been doing a lot of errand runs to Akihabara lately for two clients, and after a few consecutive trips I’ve noticed two interesting trends in the hard-disk market.  First, now that SATA and SATA-II are pretty well adopted in the desktop market, a “portable version” to rival USB and Firewire is picking up steam.  eSata is a connector that provides the same technology benefits – notably 3Gbps, compared to USB’s 440Mbps and Firewire’s 400Mbps (or 1398b’s 800Mbps) – in a tight package.  After taking a brief look at what’s available now, I’m growing quite excited for what’s to come over the next few months.  If you’re in the market for some new hard-drives, I would seriously consider any Sata or e-Sata options.

The second interesting trend is in hard-disk RAID towers.  A few months ago I caved in and bought a box that would hold four 250GB 3.5″ hard drives in part to store my iTunes collection, and I’m already nearing full capacity on one of the software-RAID 1 sets (i.e., two 250GB drives being mirrored, so my collection is almost at 250GB; the second set is used for other data).  I spent considerable time researching different options for expandability, features, etc., and decided a no-frills plastic IDE-drive box was the way to go, but I may have been a bit premature in my purchase.

Since SATA drives are magnitudes faster than UltraATA, and since there are RAID boxes which can host SATA drives but connect externally via Firewire or USB, that’s the way I should have gone.  Sure the bottleneck is in the connection to the computer, but getting SATA disks would be an investment while I wait for the next Mac Mini to include an eSata connection (hint, hint!)  On the other hand, hard drive prices are dropping each week and are having trouble keeping up with the capacity increases – today I just saw a Lacie 320GB portable drive for only 30,000yen!  And what’s more, it uses only bus power!  “How does it manage that?” you ask?  Turns out there are two 160GB 2.5″ drives inside, and it’s super fast because it uses RAID 0 (striping).  If you want one of these cheap Lacie’s (here’s a product link) the special deal is at Akibakan – one of my favorite stops for all Mac goodness.

Anyways, as the post title hints at, it seems the trend to stack “off the shelf” items has permeated into the hard drive space.  First it was creating computer clusters of cheap linux boxen, then it was creating multi-core processors.  Multi-monitor setups are gaining popularity as well, and now it’s about stacking hard disks not just for storage, but speed.  As they say, the more the merrier – even fans of x-treme programming will tell you.  So what’s next? 

By the way, one of my clients needs a video-surveillance system and if there’s a place I would consider investing my money, it’s in the surveillance-camera market.  More on that in another post.