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Seagate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive
Stoobalou writes "After a few weeks of rumours, Seagate's senior product manager Barbara Craig has confirmed that the company is announcing a 3TB drive later this year, but the move to 3TB of storage space apparently involves a lot more work than simply upping the areal density. The ancient foundations of the PC's three-decade legacy has once again reared its DOS-era head, revealing that many of today's PCs are simply incapable of coping with hard drives that have a larger capacity than 2.1TB."
I ran into that a few years ago when I added a 4TB hardware RAID5 to my Linux server. The partition table that is made by fdisk can't handle it. I was forced to use parted to make an EFI partition table instead. It was a little different but completely doable. Took me about 2 minutes on Google to find a howto.
most file systems already use a 4k sector.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Everything works on Mac, because Apple doesn't support legacy stuff. They assume any Mac older than ~5 years is obsolete, and therefore moved to 64-bit addressing long ago.
(No I'm not trolling. I'm bitter. I had to toss a perfectly good Mac G4, just because Apple stopped supporting it, and its ancient Safari 2 browser could no longer render the web properly.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
And if their sectors don't fall on a physical boundary, then you've just used 8KB on the physical drive.
If you're on windows, you'll either need EFI or a separate boot drive.
Windows cannot boot from driver larger than 2 TB
The issue is, MBR doesn't support drives that big, so you have to use GPT (which Windows won't boot from w/o EFI). ;)
So if you're on Windows, but without EFI, you're SOL.
Also, kind of a pain on *nix+BIOS combos too.
No, we are not. We may count in binary for memory, but it's different for physical hard drives with spinning disks. For these, we count in platters (the actual physical disk(s) spinning in the drive).
Hard drives typically have somewhere between 1 to 4 platters. Drives with more platters exist, but they're less common.
Common platter sizes: 500GB, 375GB, 333G, 250GB
I didn't RTFA (this is slashdot, come on), but I'm guessing what Seagate really did was come out with a 750GB platter, that can be used to produce a 3GB drive with 4 of those platters. You'll probably see the 4TB drive you want when they come out with a 1TB platter.
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And if the physical boundary is 512 bytes, this won't happen.
You need to be able to use larger than 32-bit block addresses. This is possible since the LBA spec uses 48-bit addresses. But the internals of some OSes use only 32-bit block addresses. The solution to this is to use a 64-bit OS. That allows 48-bit addresses (and then some).
Another other problem is that the MBR disk partitioning scheme uses 32-bit block addresses, so you can't partition a disk larger than 2TB. But the answer to this is to use GUID disk partitioning.
Finally there's your BIOS, it probably only supports MBR and 32-bit LBA. GUID disk partitioning supports making your disk look like an MBR disk so you can boot off it. You'll have to boot off a partition that starts within the first 2TB of the disk, but other than that you should be okay. Just make sure to never use any tools that think your disk is an MBR disk when you are repartitioning it or otherwise accessing it directly.
Windows 7 (or Vista) 64-bit supports >32-bit LBA and GUID disk partitioning.
And then finally hope you don't get any nasty viruses that try to go around the OS to access the disk (so as not to be detected) and mess it up when the calculations overflow 32 bits.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
By "long ago", you mean in their very latest OS release in late 2009? Despite their opportunity several years ago to make a clean break from 32-bit when they switched to Intel, they didn't do that. They supported your legacy hardware and software for years. Linux and BSD should still work fine on a G4, even though it's about eight years old.
And if their sectors don't fall on a physical boundary, then you've just used 8KB on the physical drive.
100% false.
You still only use 4K on the physical drive. You just have to read & write 8K at a time because the misaligned 4K filesystem block straddles two physical blocks. But since filesystem blocks are packed sequentially there is no wasted space, they are just all misaligned by the same offset.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's what I get for responding too quickly. You're totally right.
(a hardware RAID ..... but you get massive speed increases).
Hasn't been true since like the 90s. Linux software raid is always quicker, and far more interoperable and standardized.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
15 years ago when you were paying $500 for a 320MB hard drive, did you ever anticipate your home PC would someday have a capacity of multiple terabytes? Could you imagine that a laptop would ever be able to hold over a terabyte?
Yes, yes I did. I notice your very high six digit UID. Now when my father's employer paid something like $20K for a 5 meg DASD the size of a filing cabinet when I was a little kid, I never imagined I could buy my own personal "winchester disc" for less than "a buck a meg" but I finally did that on sale around 1990-ish timeframe. At that point you kind of get the idea that increasing capacity is a way of life. And its been that way for decades.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Not only can you get the latest Safari 3 (3.2.3) to run on Tiger and it's only a year old, you can get the latest and greatest Safari 4.0.5 on Tiger.
Links:
Safari 4.0.5
Safari 3.2.3 for Tiger
Yes it does, according to Apple: http://support.apple.com/downloads/Safari_3_2_3_for_Tiger, and you could still install Leopard on your machine...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Snow Leopard is not pure 64 bit OS. By default it has 32 bit kernel on all hardware except the XServe, and it can be booted with 64 bit kernel on some other more recent hardware but not all things work in that configuration.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Because 512 byte sectors allow for less empty space waste than anything larger.
Um, no. The sector size dictates what boundaries the OS has to do reads and writes on. It doesn't dictate how the OS uses the space. 4k sectors means that to read or write an aligned 4k filesystem block, the OS has to do one I/O operation instead of eight; and that if it wants to write a 512-byte block, it has to do a read-modify-write cycle.
How efficiently small files get stored is a property of the filesystem, which doesn't even know about the sector size. Common filesystems all use 4k blocks or bigger anyway. Some filesystems store files smaller than 4k efficiently by packing them in with the metadata or dedicating some blocks to store several files per block. Filesystems that do this include, most notably, NTFS, and also some Linux filesystems like ReiserFS and btrfs. Wikipedia calls this block suballocation (don't know if this term is standard). This is totally orthogonal to the sector size.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
FAT32 is a file system type. It can at most limit the size of a partition. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of a disk.
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If you die in debt, you're ahead.