Tiny 1 Terabyte Backup Device for P2

[Steve Mullen]

San Diego-based Sabio Digital has introduced a consumer level storage box capable of storing one Terabyte, and up. The Sabio Storage CM-4 box has an Intel Xscale 400 MHz processor and four hard-drives. The box runs on an embedded Linux operating system and is compatible with either PCs or Macs.

The CM-4 is about the size of a BIG TOASTER and weighs around 20 lbs. Four drives with up to 500 GB of storage each can be inserted for up to 2 TB of total storage. With 2 TBs of RAID 1, you would have 1 TB of video storage.

Two USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port are offered for connectivity. Users can set up folder shares and even FTP access to the box. Backup software is included which allows users to set up scheduled backups.

The CM-4 is currently available for $1000 for the 1 TB version.

No mention of what the maximum data transfer rate would be from a computer via the USB port. Need at least 15MB/S to backup an hour of P2 in an hour. Ideally one would want 30MB/S so Copy and Verify can be done within an hour, before you erase your P2. Better yet -- about 50MB/S so faster than real-time so one can have a P2 card ready for use before the current one is filled.

I'm a FireWire guy. How fast is USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet when transfering bulk data?

This size and wight could go on location with a laptop that had a PCMIA slot.

[Dan Euritt]

that's an nas(network attached storage device), so if you wanted to go that direction, there are a number of other offerings you could look at as well... but you'd need a way to initiate the transfer process(??), which would indeed imply having to hook it up to a pc, and having a p2 reader with a gigabit port on it... but getting back to your original question:

"Gigabit Ethernet will benefit from the upcoming PCI Express spec, since the 40-80MB/sec throughput Gigabit Ethernet currently delivers can put the current PCI bus under a severe load." -http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1151593,00.asp

usb 2.0 should be good for just over 30 MB/sec sustained??

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Originally Posted by Dan Euritt

that's an nas(network attached storage device), so if you wanted to go that direction, there are a number of other offerings you could look at as well... but you'd need a way to initiate the transfer process(??), which would indeed imply having to hook it up to a pc, and having a p2 reader with a gigabit port on it... but getting back to your original question:

"Gigabit Ethernet will benefit from the upcoming PCI Express spec, since the 40-80MB/sec throughput Gigabit Ethernet currently delivers can put the current PCI bus under a severe load." -http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1151593,00.asp

usb 2.0 should be good for just over 30 MB/sec sustained??

This device also works as a standard USB mass storage device, so it doesn't have to be a NAS config.

As for gigabit ethernet, that's 1000Mbps max throughput, so that's 2.5X the max throughput of Firewire400 or 1.25X Firewire800. Latency on ethernet vs. Firewire is very comparable and with a good interface and network structure (capable switch hardware, if used), sustaining a rate close to the maximum 1Gbps is entirely do-able.

USB2 - it's been hashed over here a lot lately and I don't really want to get back into it. According to the spec, it should be 20% (480Mbps max) faster than Firewire if properly implemented by the manufacturer and installed by the user. Although it seems that many people don't experience this sort of euphoria with their USB2 devices, either due to poor device design/implementation and/or cluttered USB2 config. From my own personal experience, I have had some lackluster USB2 performance and most of the issues have been cleared up by removing junk devices like hubs and isolating the performance HDD or device on its own USB root. As we would do with our Firewire devices - most of us don't tend to daisy-chain our Firewire HDDs and cameras off a single port or use hubs, yet we stack tons of USB devices onto a single USB port, which is in fact one of many ports connected to the root hub on our systems. Hmmmm...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Also, the quote about gigabit ehternet putting a load on the PCI bus is mostly true. 32bit 33MHz PCI is limited to a maximum of 133MB/s, so a gigabit ethernet interface at full capacity would need 125MB/s, so that pretty well saturates that bus. PCI-Express isn't entirely necessary, 64bit PCI and PCI-X also handle gigabit with ease along with a few other deives. Most newer systems incorporate their gigabit ethernet controller right into the chipset I/O controller so the ethernet connection is sitting right on the system bus, before branching out to the PCI host controllers. So, these days you don't really have to worry about gigabit being a bottleneck unless you're adding that capability to a system as an add-on PCI card. In a notebook, unless the gigabit port is already present, don't bother... It will saturate a 32bit Cardbus PCMCIA interface. You will want an ExpressCard interface like on newer PC notebooks and the new MacBook Pro... But these newer notebooks have a gigabit port on them to begin with anyway.

[Toke Lahti]

Buffalo's TeraStation has one advantage: raid5.

[Rob Lohman]

Western Digital just introduced a new 500 GB S-ATA (300 MB/s version) drive
that is supposed to run cool and quiet. I know there are NAS boxes that can
house two drives and have 100 mbps or 1 gbps connections to allow fast
access. Together with two of those drives you've got an even smaller box with
still 1 TB in it.

[Dan Euritt]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kilgroe

This device also works as a standard USB mass storage device, so it doesn't have to be a NAS config.

yes, but what were the speed advantages to be gained from utilizing the fast ethernet interface.

here is another approach that could be looked into, more in line with what rob was saying(?), but with SATA-II, "desktop terabyte": http://informationweek.com/news/show...leID=177102947

how does that compare in speed and pricing to nas boxes.

[Giroud Francois]

the problem with these linux boxes is they use their own disk format (samba probably).
This cannot be read directly by a PC, you need to use it as network drive.
I doubt that a networked drive is able to go even half of the 1000Mbit/s bandwith due to the overhead of the OS.

[Rob Lohman]

A good (gigiabit) network adapter with driver should have no problem
outperforming your harddisk, unless you have them in a RAID configuration.

[Jim Michael]

Originally Posted by Giroud Francois

the problem with these linux boxes is they use their own disk format (samba probably).
This cannot be read directly by a PC, you need to use it as network drive.
I doubt that a networked drive is able to go even half of the 1000Mbit/s bandwith due to the overhead of the OS.

Samba is not a disk format, but you are right that linux has its own filesystem. Accessing a disk retrieved from a failed system might be as easy as booting a PC with the disk installed (possibly in a firewire enclosure) with a Knoppix CD, but that would have to be confirmed. I don't think that you would be able to retrieve data from a disk mounted in a firewire enclosure from a Mac if the disk is formatted with a Linux filesystem, but I'll be happy to be proved wrong on this.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Originally Posted by Giroud Francois

the problem with these linux boxes is they use their own disk format (samba probably).
This cannot be read directly by a PC, you need to use it as network drive.
I doubt that a networked drive is able to go even half of the 1000Mbit/s bandwith due to the overhead of the OS.

Well, when connecting via USB, it doesn't really matter which operating system is embedded, Linux or whatnot. As long as the drive(s) are formatted in an industry standard file system, Windows will connect to it (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS4, ISOnnnn, UDF, etc..). If it's a Mac format (like HFS), then you would need the proper filesystem driver and I haven't found a common filesystem yet that can't be supported under Win32. As for connecting to a Mac, not as many file systems are supported, but most of the common ones still are so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

When connecting via the network - using this as a NAS device, then I would imagine it has proper network protocols to communicate with PC/Mac systems - like Samba (SMB), but there are plenty of other options for NAS devices to use that are universally supported.