News - Seagate introduces world’s first 3TB hard drive

[watercooled]

Yeah that makes sense. I reckon a fair few people will just rip the caddy open and use the bare drive anyway though, unless it doesn't work of course.

[Funkstar]

Chances are it would work, a SATA controller should be a SATA controller. Seagate just wont have tested it and made sure it works.

[montecarlos]

i dont need more than 500gb.... and if I do, i will get another 500GB when they cost 30 quid! haha

[12GaugeShotty]

Yeah that makes sense. I reckon a fair few people will just rip the caddy open and use the bare drive anyway though, unless it doesn't work of course.

Completely voids the warranty though.

[jim]

Can't you just pop it back into the caddy and send it back?

Surely they don't have tamper-resistant seals on them?

[watercooled]

Possibly, my WD MyBook didn't but it's a real pain to open and it's unlikely you'd do it without leaving marks behind, even so I doubt they could use it as proof you opened it. Of course this could be completely different though.

[bignev]

I remember seeing the Anandtech article when it first appeared. The rationale for "efficiency" is complete cobblers. Since drives look ahead and read far more data than one sector at once, all Seagate needed to do was generate ECC data for multiple sectors. This would be transparent to the outside world (BIOS, OS etc.) and would have avoided messing up every existing OS! Do I detect some conspiracy involving Microsoft to force XP users on to W7?

[TAKTAK]

Do I detect some conspiracy involving Microsoft to force XP users on to W7?

It's hardly a conspiracy to stop pushing updates out to an archaic OS that you've already pushed the end of support period out to a later date...

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?C2=1173

[jim]

Do I detect some conspiracy involving Microsoft to force XP users on to W7?

No, it's the aliens.

[watercooled]

TBH I find it annoying when legacy software/hardware holds things back, here for example they could just release a native 4k sector drive which wouldn't be compatible with XP but would stop all the faffing about and double checking you need to do with the jumpers etc to make sure you have it set correctly, and further legacy BIOS is preventing drive MFRs from just switching to GPT and lifting the capacity cap for the foreseeable future (and encouraging motherboard MFRs to finally start releasing EFI boards!). There's nothing to stop them from releasing both types of drive, one a proper 4k for newer systems and one a legacy compatible drive.