Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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One Terabtye Disk for Under $500

Well, I have concluded that it has finally happened! One TB for under $500. We all have been watching the ads for disk storage of the past year, seeing the prices go down and capacities increase. It was just a matter of time...

Okay, this disk is not managed storage with UPS and RAID redundancy in a standard rack, but it is a whole terabyte. Do you realize how many libraries this datastore could contain?

Here are the details: LaCie Big Disk 1TB, USB 2.0 Hard Drive, Model 300966U, 5.25" 1U External Hot-swappable, 7200RPM with 8MB cache, Data Transfer Rate of 480Mbps Maximum, 34MBps Sustained. And..... it is 1.7" Height x 6.7" Length x 10.6" Depth and weights just 5 pounds.

At BUY.com the LaCie Big Disk is $458.52 with no tax and free shipping.

For BI/DW professionals, what does this mean? It certainly give a whole new meaning for independent (personal) data marts. We can have some amazingly rich stores of business information. But, for what purpose? Can we maintain data consistency across the enterprise when we have terabytes walking the hallways and out the doors? Can we maintain data security across the enterprise? This raises familiar issues that will only get more intense.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn on Monday, 4 December 2006 | Permalink