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

[HEXUS]

Overcoming technical hurdles, Seagate provides more storage space than you know what to do with.

Read more.

[kalniel]

For a nice explanation of the 'efficiency' savings of 4k clusters see this article, which shows WD's solution to the legacy 512byte only aware OSen:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888

[Funkstar]

Overcoming technical hurdles, Seagate provides more storage space than you know what to do with.

Oh no, I know exactly what to do with the space... provided these are compatible with my RAID card

[Singh400]

Yeah but its Seagate so...ya'know..pass.

[jim]

I think this might be the first time a new high capacity disk has come out and I've had no need for it.

2TB are doing perfectly for me at the moment!

[Saracen]

Yeah but its Seagate so...ya'know..pass.

It comes and goes, though.

I've got loads of Seagate drives, and the only ones that have ever let me down was when a mains power spike blew most of the machine, including physically blowing a chunk out of a chip on one (of four) of the drives. I also have loads of WD drives, but a friend won't touch 'em because he's had too many problems. Most manufacturers have been through a dodgy patch at some point. I guess you pay yer money and take yer chance.

[s_kinton]

If nothing else, this should mean cheaper 1GB and 2GB drives will follow shortly.

Those drives sizes are pennies these days!

[MSIC]

I wonder if anyone here knows ... can these 3TB drives be accessed as an external drive by WinXP 32bit?

[spoon_]

32bit OS is only capable of 2TB max. volume...

[jim]

Thankfully, Seagate has this one covered too, by using its SmartAlign technology to ensure all data fits properly into the 4K sectors, even on Windows XP.

Article seems to imply that it will work. The external factor shouldn't make a difference - and if it did, it would only be a positive change, since Seagate have full control over the interface and controller as compared to an internal disk.

[badass]

It comes and goes, though.

I've got loads of Seagate drives, and the only ones that have ever let me down was when a mains power spike blew most of the machine, including physically blowing a chunk out of a chip on one (of four) of the drives. I also have loads of WD drives, but a friend won't touch 'em because he's had too many problems. Most manufacturers have been through a dodgy patch at some point. I guess you pay yer money and take yer chance.

And this is why I will not buy an HDD that's getting rave reviews but is very new now.

[TAKTAK]

32bit OS is only capable of 2TB max. volume...

It's not really the fact that it is a 32bit OS that is the limiting factor.

The limit is imposed by the MBR partition table through use of 512 sectors.

4294967296 total sectors (i.e. the 32bit), with 512 bytes per sector

so times them together giving a total max of 2199023255552 bytes, divide by 1024, and again, and again.

Et voila, 2048GiB, AKA 2TiB



However, increase the sector size to 4K, and you bump the max size greatly (16TiB)

Everything is slowly (very) moving to GPT, over MBR really...

However, XP32 will not be receiving official support for 4K sector drives...

[12GaugeShotty]

Yeah but its Seagate so...ya'know..pass.

Same here.

[watercooled]

USB 2 on a drive this size = epic fail. I really don't understand why, as the first company with a 3TB drive on the market, they wouldn't sell the bare drive? Maybe it has something to do with the 2TB boot drive limits or something so people don't buy one, try to boot from it and then complain. But then why not just ask retailers to add a little note saying storage drive only or something?

[jim]

They'll release it in time, would be stupid not to.

They're probably just trying to work out the best way of making it fully compatible.

[Funkstar]

They did this with the first 1.5TB drives as well.

I assume this means they can release the drive sooner because they don't need to test it against a bunch of different controllers, as long as it works with their SATA to USB bridge chip then it's all OK. then they will start testing it with motherboard controllers and RAID chipsets before releasing a different version of the bare drive or just the same drive with updated firmware.