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zxspectrum1982

I'm waiting for years for external 2.5" disks to go beyond 5 TB :-(

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What are you waiting for?

Buy this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OJ3UJ2S

Buy this, and stick this in that: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089C3TZL9

That usb a to usb a cable is beyond cursed.

Okay. That's pretty funny!

I didn't even notice, I just picked the first 2.5" enclosure Amazon showed me.

If only USB was peer to peer like FireWire. Then again, there'd probably be some trade-off to that.

USB 4, being thunderbolt, actually allows this I think

Thunderbolt is capable of doing this, but USB has had support for peer to peer and alternative client support for quite a while. USB OTG (On-The-Go), which allows a USB client device to also act as a host, has been around since the 2.0 spec. This is what lets USB devices like phones and tablets also connect to card readers, keyboards, and other USB devices.

What Thunderbolt can do however that is quite magical, is operate as a point to point network interface. Driver support can be a bit dodgy, but it's totally feasible to build a 3 node compute cluster with point to point cluster node networking over Thunderbolt at 20 Gb/s.

Before I understood the host/client nature of USB, I was convinced this magic non-existent USB-to-USB cable would let me connect any PC to any PC and copy between them like giant flash drives.

Mac’s _almost_ have a giant flash drives mode with target disk mode but via USB-C.

I've seen infomercial-tier products laid out like that back in the XP era. They use bespoke software, and probably some sort of IP over USB to work, but I've never needed to buy one.

Looking it up just now indicates that such products still exist. https://plugable.com/products/usb3-tran

The usb-c version of the same is even more confusing, either it's a normal type-c cable and the software is all you get, or it's a cursed bespoke type-c cable that will haunt you for years.

Get an a dual nvme enclosure and stick in two nvme 8TB drives. Or get two such enclosures and 4x 4TB drives (they are 4 times cheaper)

There are 16TB 2.5" SSDs now, unless it must be mechanical.

What vendor? All I can find is 3.5" :-(

What does that go for, price of a used car?

Dell sells a VisionTek 16TB for... $3800.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/visiontek-16tb-class-qlc-7mm...

(Rural problems: I tried to find a used car under $3800 on Craigslist here and there's less than 5 vehicles total 'by owner' and none of them drive on their own power. Maybe this is a good deal?)

Only a factor of 20 higher than the equivalent 16tb spinning rust. Not as bad as I expected to be honest.

If it were PCIe it would be a screaming deal, but it's sata. That would take a hot minute to fill at a max 500 megs/sec.

There are even ~62TB 2.5” ssds. I think there’s one from Solidigm/Intel.

Caveat: Only available if you have a budget on the order of $100-300k USD.

Seems like it’s around $8k. Which is obviously a lot, but not that bad when looking at $/GB cost. (61.4TB for $8k).

https://www.cdw.com/product/solidigm-d5-p5336-61.44-tb-solid...

Wow that is pretty incredible! Thanks for the correction.

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