Beyond Micro's 6TB Drivezilla Grande

4.5 terabytes of storage not enough for you? Well, data junkies, it looks like you can count on Beyond Micro to keep feeding your storage addiction, with the company recently beefing up its Drivezilla Grande tower to a ridiculously spacious 6TB. That mighty feat is accomplished by cramming eight 750GB 3.5-inch drives into the desktop-sized box which, by default, will show up as a single 6TB drive on your computer (at which point you'll likely need a tissue to wipe away the tears of joy). Those looking for RAID support, however, will be sorely disappointed, as will anyone hoping for a FireWire connection, with USB 2.0 the only interface option (rest assured, it is USB 1.1 compatible). What's more, if you find that 6TB isn't cutting it a few years down the line, you can just swap out a few drives and go for double digits, though there's no room to simply add additional drives. Terabytes don't come cheap, of course, especially six of 'em, with this Drivezilla also breaking another barrier: the $4,000 one.

[Thanks, Justin W.]

[Jeremy @ Dec 8th 2006 5:50PM]

> rest assured, it is USB 1.1 compatible

I'm not quite sure that's reassuring...

[Richard Vialoux @ Dec 8th 2006 5:56PM]

thats a lot of porn!

[Michael @ Dec 8th 2006 6:27PM]

It sure is Richard, but unfortunately it's still not enough...

[Richard Vialoux @ Dec 8th 2006 6:50PM]

Its never enough :)

[Phil Jackson @ Dec 8th 2006 6:38PM]

I really don't understand all the fuss about these... Here's a 12-bay SATA chasis that costs $857 bucks. Bought six 750GB Seagate drives a

Check out the Norcotek DS-1220 (www.norcotek.com) chasis (recently blogged about setting up RAID on a DS-1220 at phillipjackson.com)

[Phil Jackson @ Dec 8th 2006 6:43PM]

Above I tried to write a coherent entry, I really did.

...what I was trying to say is that the Norcotek DS-1220 (www.norcotek.com) is a wonderful 12-bay SATA enclosure that runs about $850 at NewEgg.com. I recently posted (at phillipjackson.com) how to set the device up with soft RAID (using mda's) on a Fedora Core 4 Linux box. I now have 3.4TB of available storage, RAID-5.

My only disapointment is the cable system used to attach the chasis to the included eSATA controller. The connectors don't snap in and consequently run the risk of falling out if knocked, etc.

[iGotNoTime @ Dec 8th 2006 7:09PM]

Color me as ignorant but at these prices of $500- $4k would it not be cheaper to buy a $200 barebones kit, throw an OS on it and a server case with 8 bays? I mean hell you could throw in a PCI wireless G card and hide the case on the top shelf of your closet making it a wi-fi NAS box right? What am I missing here?

[rasputnik @ Dec 8th 2006 7:20PM]

No RAID on something that big? Bad Idea.

Especially when you just increased the chances of failure 8 times.

[Curt Onstott @ Dec 9th 2006 8:50PM]

Ditto. You WILL have a drive failure at some point. JBOD scares me for that reason.

[Eric @ Dec 8th 2006 7:23PM]

All from newegg

ASUS Terminator T1 $85
128MB DDR266 $15
2x 500GB SATA drive $300
FreeNas $0

1TB for $420 shipped.... for $4200 you can have 10TB and redundant server

[unL33T @ Dec 8th 2006 7:47PM]

The barebones idea is definitely better than this product.
Someone should just start compiling those and selling them as a far cheaper replacement for something like this (and they probably do already).

[Thor @ Dec 8th 2006 9:08PM]

So will this circumvent the 2GB drive size limit in 32bit versions of windows or do you need 64bit?

[cjrenaud @ Dec 8th 2006 11:58PM]

There is no 2GB drive size limit. FAT32 in Windows 2000/XP has a maximum 32GB partition size (though it can go up to 2TB with Windows ME/98 and with third-party utilities--which is important if you need to reformat your 40GB+ iPod). NTFS is 2TB.

Perhaps you're thinking about a 2GB RAM limitation common (but not a hard limit, by any means) with 32-bit operating systems?

[Mark @ Dec 9th 2006 3:30AM]

Jesus Lord, 6 terabytes.. that sure is a helluva lot of porn and DVD .iso files from Bit Torrent.

But, what sense does it make for this thing to be USB only? I use my laptop all over my house as my sole computer, and there's no way I'd want to lug this drivezilla monster around with me wherever my laptop goes.. it would make much more sense to make it a NAS box wouldn't it?? And 4 grand is definitely ridiculously expensive

[Thor @ Dec 9th 2006 8:25AM]

Ahh yes i was refering to the NTFS limit of 2TB :D

[rasputnik @ Dec 10th 2006 4:25AM]

NTFS has a 256TB limit, not 2.