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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."
If games are the only thing holding you back, let me recommend GOG.com or if you're really old school Dos Box.
Both are awesome suggestions, but I still like having a top-of-the-line PC circa the year 2000 with Windows 98 installed on it laying around. It's like using an NES emulator vs. playing a game on NES hardware. Sure, you technically are playing the same game...but the experience isn't quite the same :-)
Living With a Nerd
I'm aware that hard disk capacity follows a trend similar to Moore's law in that capacity roughly doubles every two years or thereabouts, but much like the CPU industry, does anyone know how far into the future magnetic storage will continue to scale at that pace? Even though solid state drives are becoming more affordable and the performance issues are being ironed out, when magnetic storage is only $70 / TB, it's hard to pass up. I'm just interested in how much longer we can expect to see capacity gains like this.
Is there anyone who currently works in that area or has a background in magnetic storage who has a better idea?
We are counting in binary are we not?
Not when it comes to disk drives. The total storage in a spinning media drive is based on the number of platter sides used, which can range from 1 to 6 (or perhaps 8 ... does anyone still use four platters?), the areal density of storage on the surface, and how much of the surface is devoted to spare tracks to cover for manufacturing defects (and probably other factors I'm forgetting). None of these are based on powers of two phenomena.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Seagate used to be the go-to disk drive maker. But in the last few years their quality has slipped and Western Digital became the better manufacturer.
But I seem to detect that quality and reliability is returning to Seagate's devices. Does anybody have any recent experience with Seagate to share?
Best regards.
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.
Minor nitpick but that would be a 6TB drive. Probably 2 dual sided platters at 0.750TB per side.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Because there's no way anyone would attach old peripherals to newer machines ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.