New 4Tb Harddrive! Almost!!

[Joelc]

Warm wishes for a happy and healthy new year to everyone !

Yes, a happy, healthy and prosperous new year to everyone...and, of course, this being the K forum, filled with lots of wonderful K toys...

 

[JerryL]

I was thinking it would be fun to be watching Rendezvous while driving the same route in Paris and seeing if you could beat the driver in the video.

I knew I liked you.

GL pulling that off today.

 

[Transepoch]

A horrible thought just walked up and smacked me in the face... don't drives over 2T require a slightly different (EFI) signaling, and likely isn't something that K could even do without a hardware refresh?

 

[Mr.Poindexter]

You cannot update the firmware to do that?

 

[JDS]

Interesting point.

The following is a quote from K's FAQ:

"A 1U or 3U Server can serve DVD movies or music to up to 45 zones simultaneously; and can serve Blu-ray movies to up to 5 zones simultaneously."

I can see a case for increasing the Blu-ray capability.

A future server upgrade could appear sooner rather than later if new hardware is required for 4TB drives.

 

[Mr.Poindexter]

The 5 zone limit for BluRay is going to be due to drive speed. A single hard drive cannot keep more than 5 BluRay film streams active without getting choppy. If the films are located on different hard drives then one should be able to stream more than 5 titles but it is hard to explain that without getting people asking "how do I tell which hard drive it is on?" and overly confusing the situation.

When I get 6 M-class players, I will try and see how many titles I can stream.

 

[Transepoch]

Well, isn't that the limit for one movie to multiple zones? I thought I remember seeing a different limit for the number of simultaneous HD movies.

 

[Mr.Poindexter]

I thought that was the physical limitations of the current drives being able to reliably stream only 5 independant streams from a single drive should all films be located on that drive. If you have another bit of info, link it please. If mistaken, I would like the correct information.

 

[Transepoch]

Not sure, looks like it was just comments about limits on the eldest servers that got stuck mentally under the wrong qualifier.

 

[MTrueblood]

So, returning to the thread's headline, how close are we to having larger, commercial grade hard drives? Consumer level 3T drives have been out for a few months. I wonder how long the interval is between initial introduction and release of a reliable, commercial unit. So far I haven't seen mention of a working consumer grade 4T drive. Anybody know how these projects are coming along?

 

[Mr.Poindexter]

I believe that the lag isn't from commercially available units but from enterprise class drives being available. We have had 1TB notebook drives available for quite some time now but they are still not available for the CinemaOne server and that would move it up to 450 DVDs or capacity from the current 225, which I think is a huge step up. I do not know of any enterprise grade 1TB 2.5" drives though, although they may be coming out now.

Remember, Kaleidescape carries all the service burden for these drives so they want something that is substantially more reliable than the ordinary consumer demands from their drives.

 

[JDS]

I expect to wait at least 4-6 months for K to release a new drive after the first enterprise drives have been released. Don't know how accurate this will be but I doubt new drives will be released until late this year at the earliest. Hope I am wrong.