News - Western Digital joins 3TB club

[HEXUS]

New portable high-capacity drives come with super-speedy USB 3.0.

Read more.

[Jedibeeftrix]

what will the 2TB external drive cost i wonder?

and how fast will the drive be?

[Funkstar]

Well this is a start.

I wonder when we can expect to see the bare drives in retail?

[Pandora92]

Well this is a start.

I wonder when we can expect to see the bare drives in retail?

Hm, probably not any time soon, having over 2TB in an external is fine because then it's regulated by Windows once connected and the BIOS doesn't come into it, but I know that the BIOS system in general has a problem recognizing anything over 2TB in a single drive, which means until motherboards start to definitively move to UEFI then we probably wont be seeing any. :|

[redddraggon]

Hm, probably not any time soon, having over 2TB in an external is fine because then it's regulated by Windows once connected and the BIOS doesn't come into it, but I know that the BIOS system in general has a problem recognizing anything over 2TB in a single drive, which means until motherboards start to definitively move to UEFI then we probably wont be seeing any. :|

Surely that's only an issue if you want the drive as a boot drive? For use as a storage drive, surely it doesn't matter how the BIOS handles a drive bigger than 2TB if you only want to store stuff on it?

[Pandora92]

Surely that's only an issue if you want the drive as a boot drive? For use as a storage drive, surely it doesn't matter how the BIOS handles a drive bigger than 2TB if you only want to store stuff on it?

Well as far as I'm aware (I guess I could be wrong) the BIOS still sees the drive and tries to deal with it in some way, which it's unable to do because it can't handle over 2TB.

Also obviously drives over 2TB don't work with a 32-bit system either, which theoretically cuts out a lot of their potential market and makes them less feasible until most people are using a 64-bit OS, although this limitation also applies to external drives like this AFAIK.

[oolon]

Actually if they use an advance format 8k sector size rather than 512 bytes, as MBR system can support 32 TB drives. 32bit systems can use 64 bit numbers, what actually happened is until 64 bit processors came along everyone assumed 32 bits for almost everything, and there did not seem much point in having larger numbers. If you want a linear memory model there is a 4GB limit for 32 bit numbers, however NUMA allows more than that on a 32 bit machine. However none of this has any bearing on hard drives because they use 48bit numbers to do 2TB drives with 512 byte sectors. The problem really is the MBR is one sector and there is not enough space for the boot sector and partition information any more, so we have a completely different system for booting and partitions on drives.

[WillUK]

this looks good as im going to need a new backup drive for my huge music collection hopefully I can get some money for christmas

[miniyazz]

If you need a 3TB drive for music, something's going wrong

[chis]

Nope, you just happen to have a lot of it and want to keep it in FLAC (for example). Which is understandable, believe it or not.

[Terbinator]

Nope, you just happen to have a lot of it and want to keep it in FLAC (for example). Which is understandable, believe it or not.

But that would be like 3000+ albums

[miniyazz]

To put it in context, that's over a month of continuously playing 1080p video

I remember when 2GB was a big HDD, and I'm still at Uni so it can't have been that long ago :/

[Funkstar]

But that would be like 3000+ albums

Actually, you are looking at more like 8,000+ albums. On avaerage FLAC will be half the size of the raw PCM data from the CD. I think you can assume about 300-400MB per album, some will be a lot less, and others will be more (like multiple disk issues). Then there is the formatted capacity of these vs. the advertised capacity, giving space for 8,000 comfortably.

I know someone on another forum that has something like 16,000 albums, but that's because he bought a local music store's inventory as it was closing down, then set about ripping the whole lot and ebaying the duplicates.