8 Terabyte Hard Drive

xeltros wrote:
I've always wondered why they didn't actually do some SSD with 3.5 inches size and two layers with less miniaturised chips on them, it should drive the prices down while remaining compatible with existing NAS, shouldn't it ? Given the actual heat of an SSD, this shouldn't be a problem and making 8Tb drives should be easy with that technology (although NAND has a price, even the cheapest one).

You'd think 3.5" would be cheaper. There were some companies who made 3.5" SSD a few years ago, but they have all discontinued them. My guess is that if you want to make another form factor, then PCIe has a bigger market.

I would think an issue with 3.5" SSDs is that there is more volume in the 2.5" and smaller markets (e.g. 3.5" would be too big for laptops). So with less volume it would be harder for such products to be profitable especially considering you would need them to be priced lower than the 2.5" variant for the same capacity.

PCIe which StephenB mentioned is growing in popularity and is fast.

I agree - PCIe is an exciting form factor right now. M.2/NGFF is the fastest prosumer single endpoint form factor I've worked with. A single (rather small) card slotted in a new mobo gives you up to 770 MB/s read and ~ 600 MB/s write. Coupled with UEFI and secure boot from power off to functional desktop in under 15 seconds. I'd LOVE to see a pocket battery powered NAS that would take M.2 native.

ahpsi wrote:
I'd LOVE to see a pocket battery powered NAS that would take M.2 native.

I have a seagate battery-powered NAS (at least it became a NAS after I hacked the firmware). I was thinking I'd use it to extend the storage on the iPad and Android phone when I was away, but in practice I haven't used it much.

It'd be interesting to get the use cases that people might have for a battery-powered NAS, though probably it should be its own thread.

Well for one any mobile device could use it, like phones, tablets, even game consoles or Mac for time machine.
The second main advantage is that this would be a NAS with no UPS needed, I would gladly have a RN104 sized NAS with a 10min UPS inside for example.

Mine is the size of a 2.5" hard drive, just slightly longer. It has a 1 TB traditional drive inside, though you can apparently put in an SSD if you are handy. It runs several hours on the battery. You can see it here: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/control ... &A=details

I decided to try a hacked firmware package, that gives me lower level access, but with a plainer UI than the one seagate provides. The hacked firmware includes Samba, FTP, ssh access - most of the usual NAS stuff. It will act as a wifi bridge/router, and you can block access to the WAN IP if you want. Network access is WiFi only. It's also a SAN, so you can easily connect it to a PC USB port (it includes paragon to give you ntfs support). So you manage what's on it using USB, and access it using WiFi. You can't do both simultaneously.

It will stream videos to the ipad ok (most of what I've tried is SD), and plays well with goodreader, AVplayerHD and other similar apps.

Anyway, I haven't used it as much as I thought I would. It's not because it doesn't work reasonably well - just that in practice the mobile devices have enough storage to carry me through most trips.

Interesting, I haven't seen that one before. Throw in a '10TF25SSD' (10 MicroSD > SSD converter) with 10 128GB MicroSDXC in RAID1 and it would probably be very close to what I'm looking for.

In my case I just need to be able to quickly and safely back up data when I'm helping out a friend or business with data recovery or periodic offsite backups. Sometimes I don't have the bandwidth to get it out in the time I have and at least once I found my backup was lost because the media died between locations. The M.2 is a great mix of speed, portability and ruggedness but really any flash would suffice - just want it RAIDed for the extra peace of mind.