Well back in the day I bought my 400GB for $200 each. I’ve probably had four or five die on me last few years both Seagate and Western Digital. Even though data was safe in my ReadyNAS through the years I attritube failure to heat. Those puppies would get 65 C/ 149 F that is as hot as hell is I’m sure.
Seagate used to be fine but evidently last year or so many reports they suck too. So who is the new king? Samsung check out 1.5TB drive at 23 C / 73 F or even 27 C / 80 F which is lower than Western Digital 33C / 91 F. So 23 C or 33C? Yea I’ll take the 10 C cooler one. Next step is get five more Samsumg 1.5TB hds top populate both my ReadyNAS devices. So grats to those Koreans as Samsung seems to be putting out the coolest 1.5TB harddrives which is critical for longterm life.
Update Feb 2010 now got all 1.5TB drives and Samsung still running cooler than Western Digital.
Recently cable provider decided to bump all from 6Mbps to 10Mbps $55/month. I decided to bump from 10Mbps to 18Mbps for $67/month. Still though not fair since San Diego gets 25Mbps for $57/month. However, still 25Mbps is still behind Japan. In 2006 used fiber there from a neighbor let me share his fiber connection ($60/month he said he paid for fiber) for 2 months and got 100Mbps (12.5MB/s). America is still at twice as slow (50Mbps compared to 100Mbps) Japan and Korea.
NAS I can transfer via gigabit 1000Mbps (theoritical 125MB/s) huge files at 21MB/sec.
Now if I was on 10/100 Ethernet max is 12.5MB/s. Not getting 10 times more as harddrives are the bottleneck but twice the speed I believe it’s worth it. Although my hard drive is so busy downloading stuff and unraring it I think I like just unrarring it directly to my NAS which done at 7MB/sec.
I know technically this is approximations but for all intensive purposes the following is correct.
1000KB = 1MB (3.5 inch floppy 1.44MB, CD 700MB, email attachment 10MB limit)
1000MB = 1GB (DVD 4.4GB, DVD-9 dual-layer 8.5GB, 4GB Memory, BluRay disc 25GB)
1000GB = 1TB (1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB hard drives)
CD/DVD/Bluray read/write speeds.
36X CD speed = 5.3MB/s
4X DVD speed = 5.4MB/s
1X BluRay speed = 4.5MB/s
Internet connection speeds
56Kbps = 7KB/s (remember dial up days from 1995, got DSL in 1997)
64Kbps = 8KB/s (ISDN ring a bell anyone, maybe was 128Kbps)
512Kbps = 64KB/s
1024Kbps = 128KB/s
3G (1,000Kbps) = 125KB/s (yea iphone is slow)
1.5Mbps = 192KB/s (some DSL still at this speed and T1s)
6Mbps = 800KB/s (cable and maybe DSL)
10Mbps = 1.3MB/s (cable)
18Mbps = 2.3MB/s (cable)
25Mbps = 3.1MB/s (cable)
50Mbps = 6.3MB/s (cable)
100Mbps = 12.5MB/s (fiber, 10/100Mbps ethernet)
1000Mbps = 125MB/s (if all switches, routers are gigabit ethernet)
Time to download 10GB bluray.
1.5Mbps = 15 hrs
6Mbps = 3 hrs 45 mins
10Mbps = 2 hrs 30 mins
18Mbps = 1 hr 15 mins
25Mbps = 1 hr
50Mbps = 30 mins
100Mbps = 15mins
Time to copy 10GB bluray to NAS
unrar on the fly 7MB/s = 24 mins
10/100 ethernet 12MB/s = 14 mins
7200rpm 21MB/s = 8 mins
Last night couldn’t fall asleep. So instead of going downstairs and cranking up the home theater system downstairs and risking waking up my wife, I looked into iphone apps that stream movie and tv shows (btw, my favorite keeping track of tv shows iphone app is TV Shows) so I could watch a flick in bed on my ipod touch. Best one I found was Air Video $3. I initially played with the demo as the only limitation it has is it displays three random movies in selected directory but you can hit refresh repeatedly to locate one your looking for. Air Video is awesome as it transcodes xvid video files on my NAS on the fly with my iMac dual core 2.66GHz as the transcoding server. No you can’t do .iso or video_ts but can do just about anything else xvid, divx, mkv, avi, etc. It takes 10 seconds for it to start playing while it prepares by transcoding and buffering.
I like to set Quality to about 75% which looks fantastic. You can lower that if your on a 3G connection instead of a wifi. Love to change the Target Resolution and adjust the zoom slider. Got to decide how much your willing to crop off (don’t do too much) and trying to get some nice fill screen by increasing the height of the video. Seek to any point in the video and it’ll start playing in 10 seconds. Does not stream itunes videos purchases as that is DRM protected.