667GB platters are here

[Terbinator]

New Samsung F4EG

So, when will i get my new single platter upgrade to my F3

[dirky]

aha
that explains why the F3's are hard to get a hold of now

[Danamic]

I hope that the 2TB ones are no more than £90 when released in the next couple of weeks.

[sammorris]

So where are my 3.3TB hard disks? :|
Would be a lot easier to have drives bigger than 2TB, especially since 3TB drives have already been made.

[Funkstar]

With 667GB platters you need 5 of them for 3TB. That's going to be a hot noisy drive. Yes Seagate already have a 3TB drive, but only in an external case for the moment, reports are that is really is a hot drive.

750GB platers is where we want to be

[mikerr]

How does USB handle a >2TB volume ?

I thought that was it's limit?

[Funkstar]

USB itself doesn't have a limit. The USB-to-SATA controller inside the drive cage may have a limit, but that is going to be the same limit at SATA, and I can't find a drive size limit with a quick search so maybe it doesn't have one.

Any other limits are going to be down to the OS or the file system you use on the drive.

[sammorris]

I don't really see why USB should have a limit, because that limit should depend on the driver being used, since it's just an interface. 3TB drives do wreak all sorts of havoc, requiring 64-bit OSes along with various other filesystem changes, but it's annoying the 3TB drives haven't made it to mainstream internals yet. The 3TB externals are extremely hot, but they're also Seagates, which run far hotter than competitor's drives anyway, and the enclosure doesn't look very good for cooling either.

[oolon]

Ats all to do with the LBA mode supported by the controller. A sector is 512 bytes, the orginal LBA mode was 28 bits.

2^28=268435456
268435456*512/1024^3
128GiB (Binary Gigabytes)

This is why windows XP can only install on a partition less than 128GB in size, as the generic mode supported was LBA 28. More is only supported using the correct drivers.

Now we have LBA 32

(2^32)*512/1024^3 = 2048 GiB = 2 TiB

newer controllers have LBA 48 (not main stream though)
(2^48)*512/1024^5 = 128 PiB (1PiB = 1024 TiB 1048576 GiB)

So you can see with a 3TB drive you go over the LBA 32 limit so it is VERY important which controller you use and probably they only reason why they are installed externally, as most internal controllers will not support the LBA 48 mode. I remember before i knew all this, installing a 160GB drive in an LBA 28 machine and had it corrupt my data. You must trim the drive via a jumper and lose space if you put them in the older machines.

As an aside the reason why 8GB was so important for with large drive support (support only up to 1024 cycliners, 256 heads, 64 sectors 1024*256*64*512/1024/1024/1024). Before that there was not address translation.

[oolon]

I found out something I did not know this weekend. The the MBR system of the hard drive only supports drives up to 2 TB in size. To use a drive larger than this size you need to use a GPT table on it. Only one version of windows supports GPT is windows 7, so I think the reason why we see so few 3 TB drives is most people will not be able to use the full space and so the market for them is currently quite small. Also many less techie users would return the drive as defective. When the software is at fault.

[arthurleung]

I found out something I did not know this weekend. The the MBR system of the hard drive only supports drives up to 2 TB in size. To use a drive larger than this size you need to use a GPT table on it. Only one version of windows supports GPT is windows 7, so I think the reason why we see so few 3 TB drives is most people will not be able to use the full space and so the market for them is currently quite small. Also many less techie users would return the drive as defective. When the software is at fault.

There is also Windows XP x64 which supports GPT. In fact all 64bit OS can use GPT.

The easiest way to get around the 2TB limit is to use a hardware RAID card, which split your array into 2TB blocks and you just JBOD them in Windows. It is always the recommended way, before data recovery software started to support GPT.

[Funkstar]

that's a good point, any idea how the PERC's will react to >2TB disks?

[scaryjim]

This is why windows XP can only install on a partition less than 128GB in size, as the generic mode supported was LBA 28.

From XP SP2 onwards it supports LBA 32, so as long as your install disk is an SP2 one you can install on larger drives (he said, having just installed XP Pro on a 500GB partition ).

Frankly, though, I struggle to use all the space on a 160GB Hard drive. What on earth are you lot doing to be needing 3TB?!

[oolon]

Frankly, though, I struggle to use all the space on a 160GB Hard drive. What on earth are you lot doing to be needing 3TB?!

I bought a 2GB drive from scan last well to store disk images on it for data recovery of a system where the user and crypted things with EFS and then the machine stopped working!!! Of course he used external drives with NTFS on them which also crypted. So I have 2TB of drive images, good thing I did it too as the external drive blow up... fortunately it didn't blow up my laptop! Yesterday I was a mess, oh well this "favour" just its closing me 200 quid to sort someone else machine.