3 (and 4?) TB drives coming soon
Summary: A Seagate product manager has reportedly confirmed that 3 TB drives are coming this year. And my sources say 4 TB drives are also due in the next 90-120 days - something pricing trends also suggest. Should you wait to buy?
A Seagate product manager has reportedly confirmed to Thinq that 3 TB drives are coming this year. But sources say 4 TB drives are also due in the next 90-120 days - something pricing trends also suggest. Should you wait to buy?
History Besides the unusual pre-announcement by a product manager - these things usually get more complete corporate announcements - it is about time. 2 TB drives were first announced in January 2009 and drive capacity has historically grown at ≈40% a year. We're due.
A few weeks ago WD announced a 10k 600 GB VelociRaptor - double the size of the previous model. They've been first out of the gate several times in the last few years.
Pricing trends A 2 TB drive in an USB/eSATA enclosure was on sale for $120 the other day - a stunning deal when many 1 TB drives are still going for $70-$80 online. Such price decreases are common before a new announcement to clear old inventory and make pricing room for the new high-end product.
The XP problem Much consternation over Seagate's report that XP won't support the full capacity of the 3 (or 4?) TB drives. Evidently the original 32-bit XP can't handle enough Logical Block Addresses to go beyond a 2.1 TB boot drive.
With the 4k sector problem and - finally - a perfectly good upgrade to Windows 7 available, it is time for XP users who are pushing the capacity envelope to upgrade.
Mac Mac users: no problem. OS X has supported 8 TB since 10.2 and 10.4 supports 8 exabytes - or 8 million TB.
The Storage Bits take Don't rush out to buy one unless you absolutely have a pressing business need. The 1st quarter of volume drive production is when manufacturing processes are debugged - and you don't want a buggy drive.
The XP angst is way overblown: how many XP users are still running SP1 and need a 3 TB boot drive? Somewhere between 0 and none I'll wager.
And those 4 TB drives? Current 2 TB drives are 4 platter designs, but 5 platters can fit into a standard 3.5" form factor. A 4 platter 3 TB drive - ≈750 GB per platter - would be about 4 TB with 5 platters. Since heads and platters aren't cheap, expect to pay for the privilege of a 4 TB drive, as well as a slower ramp to volume.
The really good news with the higher capacity drives? Better performance for large file apps like video editing. More on that soon.
Comments welcome, of course. Expect great deals on 2 TB drives Real Soon Now.
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Talkback
The OS is only one potential issue.
Hardware issues...
Actually, you need UEFI - BIOS updates won't fix it.
From the second page of the link to Thinq:
<i>GPT was originally proposed as a part of Intel??????s Extensible Firmware Interface [EFI]; a user-friendly setup system designed to replace the clunky ASCII-based BIOS. This specification is now looked after by the United EFI Forum (UEFI), and one of its many new features is a larger LBA addressing scheme, which would enable enough addresses to be handed out to drives with greater capacities than 2.1TB.
However, this presents a big problem, as many standard motherboards don??????t feature a UEFI system. Some manufacturers, such as MSI, have introduced UEFI to a select few boards, but UEFI is still not the de facto standard.What??????s more, any RAID drivers, if appropriate, will also need to support Long LBA if you want to put your 3TB drives in an array.
Basically, with the original LBA limit set at 2.1TB, it seemed pointless for anyone else to prepare for any capacity beyond this, so we now have a situation where many hard drive controllers, BIOSes, drivers and operating systems are all set with caps of 2.1TB, and this is going to take an industry-wide overhaul to overturn.</i>
I'll agree that many will be throwing these things in NAS boxes, but many (possibly most) current NAS boxes may be physically incapable of utilizing the drives properly.
RE: 3 (and 4?) TB drives coming soon
Fixed the link - thanks!
Robin
oops
Compatibility is not gonna happen anytime soon
UEFI stability is garbage right now. Intel can't get their act together with proper EFI support out the door for advanced drive controller modes (RAID and AHCI) and networking, and many motherboard vendors have just completely given it the face-palm for the foreseeable future. Not only that, but notebook drives aren't at that capacity yet, so notebook vendors aren't going to adopt UEFI any time soon (some use a 32-bit UEFI, but Windows only supports 64-bit UEFI). That means that deployment and migration options are a mixed bag if desktops are on UEFI and notebooks are using legacy BIOS.
Good.. I hope the 2TB ones drop
RE: 3 (and 4?) TB drives coming soon
Robin
RE: 3 (and 4?) TB drives coming soon
I hope so. Then I can maybe get three 2TB ones for my Windows Home Server. Running the beta now with only 1 500GB drive to see how I like it but I want enough room for my music and movies and enough so I can back up my primary PC and two laptops to that server. My brother has a WHS now and he loves it. I decided to wait when I heard an upgraded version is coming out and I got all the hardware except storage.
Already there
RE: 3 (and 4?) TB drives coming soon
What about reliability?
RE: 3 (and 4?) TB drives coming soon
I thought I read that there was some new technology that was being worked on that could significantly increase the maximum storage per platter while offering better performance and reliability. Not sure if that is being put into these new drives or something that will be done later down the road.
Basically two options
RE: 3 (and 4?) TB drives coming soon
To fit that much data on the platters they'd have to optimize and pack more data bits into a smaller area, so the read/write times should be as good or better than a 1TB drive now, I'd guess. It seems logical that the more mechanical parts you have in a drive the greater the chance that one of those parts could fail (heat issues aside). A modern larger drive might have fewer mechanical parts (higher data density) than an older smaller drive, so I doubt size/capacity is a reliable indicator of hard drive life. And an older drive typically will have a much greater chance of failure over a new drive. But the MTBF rating helps give you an idea on the failure rate for a particular model of hard drive.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Smart advice, as only fools rush in
As in so many things cutting edge, this is generally good advice. Sadly the last major Seagate bug - the notorious firmware BSY bug on the Barracuda 7200.11 series - was still cropping up (i.e. plaguing customers unexpectedly) well over a year after initial production. In this case, the "cure" called for a firmware flash that only Seagate could administer themselves (short of high risk procedures) on many of the bricked models, via a contract data recovery lab.
It was strictly a YMMV kinda thing if your HDD suddenly went kaput upon boot up, in many cases well after a year of use. As for whether the data on the drive could be recovered, well, to quote a guy called Callahan: [i]Do you feel lucky, punk? [/i] <img border="0" src="http://www.cnet.com/i/mb/emoticons/laugh.gif">
XP - mounting in a folder
You mention Windows and Mac
Notebook HDDs
Notebook hard drives
Forget hard drives, I bet most laptops will do better with SSD's. But the only thing that concerns me is the limited number of R/W cycles.