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1st 3 TB drive announced

By | June 29, 2010, 8:59am PDT

Summary: Seagate has announced the industry’s 1st 3 TB drive. Beyond the obvious “first” - but certainly not the last - the announcement is interesting for several reasons.

As noted last month Seagate has announced the industry’s 1st 3 TB drive. Beyond the obvious “first” - but certainly not the last - the announcement is interesting for several reasons:

  • External only. The bare drive has not been announced - just the external version with Advanced Margin Enhancement Technology.
  • Consumer only. Normally new drives get announced as OEM products 1st. Not this time.
  • Proprietary GoFlex product only. The product is only available as a GoFlex external drive using Seagate’s proprietary GoFlex connector. Sure you could pop the case and remove the unspecified but undoubtedly SATA drive, but why? Wait a couple of months and the bare drives will be out.
  • Free NTFS driver for Mac. Cool, but I’ll wait to hear how well it works. Microsoft keeps tweaking the NTFS interface which has created problems before and no doubt will again.
  • No drive specs. Normally new drives get some pictures and a data sheet, but not this time. I assume that the drive is a 4 or maybe 5 platter job, which drives up cost, and that Seagate mostly wanted bragging rights as WD has beaten them to the punch several times lately.

The Storage Bits take
It usually takes about a quarter to get volumes up and costs down. Shipping the drive as a proprietary external drive is not only good for margins but also keeps demand manageable while the factory gears up.

Expect to see other vendors with similar announcements over the next quarter. While 3 TB is good news, the bad news is that sources tell me that 4 TB drives are slipping out to next year.

Comments welcome, of course. Update: A commenter notes that the drive may not be a SATA drive. Buyer beware! End update.

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Robin Harris

Robin Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small.

Disclosure

Robin Harris

Robin Harris is a president of TechnoQWAN, a consulting and analyst firm in northern Arizona. He also writes StorageMojo.com, a blog which accepts advertising from companies in the storage industry, and has a 25 year history with IT vendors. He has many industry contacts, many of whom are friends and all of whom he has opinions about. Robin has relationships with many companies in the technology industry. Every company he writes about may have sought to influence his opinion through carefully-crafted marketing messages and self-serving white papers, gifts ranging from desk calendars, t-shirts, lunches and trips as well as analyst or consulting assignments. He also invests in some technology companies. He may accept payment for services in stock as well. Robin discloses financial investments in or client relationships with companies named in Storage Bits. To help readers sort out the gold from the dross in his writings, Robin tries to communicate his reasons as clearly as he can. If you agree, you are intelligent and discerning. If you disagree, well, you disagree. In all cases, Robin encourages readers to subject everything they read, see or hear on the internet or from politicians to some simple questions: * What assumptions are implicit in the world view and judgments of the author? * What, if any, is the factual basis for the opinions the author expresses? * Is it reasonable, logical and clear? Your critical faculties: use ‘em or lose ‘em!

Biography

Robin Harris

Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small. He introduced a couple of multi-billion dollar storage products (DLT, the first Fibre Channel array) to market, as well as a many smaller ones. Earlier he spent 10 years marketing servers and networks. After leaving corporate life he founded TechnoQWAN, a consulting and analyst firm. He also developed StorageMojo into one of the top storage industry blogs.

Robin writes, consults, coaches and lives among the mountains of northern Arizona.

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hopefully its more reliable than the 1.5Tb
trog7 30th Jun 2010
hopefully its more reliable than the 1.5Tb,
Seagate has had loads of trouble with their 1 and 1.5 Tb drives. I recently bought a genuine Seagate External 1.5 Tb , and it is a weird unit. Sometimes when you connect it the OS can't see the drive or it thinks it is not formatted; then while the drive is in use it often makes whirring and clacking sounds like it is about to fail, this is from a brand new unit ... [and many similar reports like this on Seagate's own internet forums ]
The other weird thing is that if I take the drive and try to connect it onto a different computer than the one it was originally connected, that computer cannot see it as a logical device - even though it has detected and installed it as a mass storage unit. I think it has something to do with the automatic online registration "setup" software which partially erases it self when you let it phone home ... when first connected to a computer.
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Don't count on that internal SATA port!
ferebee 29th Jun 2010
WD has been having a hard time bringing their 2.5" 1 TB offering up to speed, with the WD10TEVT never showing up in any real volume before being supplanted by the WD10TPVT: 5200 rpm instead of 5400, and 4 KB sectors. Error rates too high with 512 B sectors, perhaps?

First to ship was the external WD My Passport Essential 1 TB. Hoping to get my hands on a WD10TPVT so I could test whether that drive fits the Unibody MacBook Pros (it does), I ordered one and pulled out the drive.

To my amazement, I found that the drive mechanism has no SATA port, but rather a USB connector mounted directly on the controller board.

Here's my writeup (in German) with photo: http://fere.be/t5 - and that was before I discovered how unreliable the micro-USB connection at the case end of the cable is.

I wouldn't be surprised if Seagate's new offering is similarly skanky.
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NTFS comment a bit weird
ComputerGeneralist 29th Jun 2010
If MS was always messing around with NTFS, then their own OS's would need constant patching to deal with it too. Add to that the fact that Linux-land has had NTFS for years. I have had to fix NTFS drives, to be sure... no drive is 100% reliable.

And besides: for a Mac application, you can always just reformat it as HFS+
0 Votes
+ -
hopefully its more reliable than the 1.5Tb
trog7 30th Jun 2010
hopefully its more reliable than the 1.5Tb,
Seagate has had loads of trouble with their 1 and 1.5 Tb drives. I recently bought a genuine Seagate External 1.5 Tb , and it is a weird unit. Sometimes when you connect it the OS can't see the drive or it thinks it is not formatted; then while the drive is in use it often makes whirring and clacking sounds like it is about to fail, this is from a brand new unit ... [and many similar reports like this on Seagate's own internet forums ]
The other weird thing is that if I take the drive and try to connect it onto a different computer than the one it was originally connected, that computer cannot see it as a logical device - even though it has detected and installed it as a mass storage unit. I think it has something to do with the automatic online registration "setup" software which partially erases it self when you let it phone home ... when first connected to a computer.

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