Slashdot Mirror
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 have to know because i have a Win98 PC that i use to play some old games and i wanted to upgrade it
If you move to 4K sectors, that should change the limit to 16TB, meaning that this shouldn't be an issue for several years. Why would you want .5K sectors on such a large drive anyway?
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.
FTFA:
According to Seagate, this includes the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista, as well as modified versions of Linux, but it doesn’t include Windows XP. Not only that, but you may not even be able to see 2.1TB of a 3TB drive when using Windows XP.
Sure, Windows XP won't allow it - but your grandmother who is still running XP isn't going out to buy a 3 TB drive. The early adopters who want or need this are the ones who are already running a compatible OS.
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 They assume any Mac older than ~5 years is obsolete, and therefore moved to 64-bit addressing long ago.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
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?
Yes, "documents".
I remember upgrading systems from DOS 3.3 to 4.0 to support larger than 32Mb hard drives. Now get off of my lawn!
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.
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.
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
Safari 3.0.4 runs on 10.4.x
Safari 4 runs on 10.5+
What G4 do you have that you can't install leopard on? I shoehorned Tiger onto an ancient G3 iMac from 2000, surely you can install leopard on a fairly recent G4, and if you can't you could have tried this http://lowendmac.com/osx/leopard/openfirmware.html
Perhaps you simply wanted a new Mac?
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
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
Probably because "the big boys" in HDD manufacture have basically nothing interesting to bring to the SSD table(other than, possibly, some fairly generic interface patents). With the possible exception of HDD r/w head manufacture, which has gotten more chip-fab like as sizes and tolerances have gotten more demanding, the manufacturing methods for the two types of drive are basically nothing alike.
Even the controller/controller firmware design isn't all that similar. HDD controllers have the task of extracting useful digital data from the ever fainter and denser analog magnetic fields on the platter. SSD controllers basically spend their time papering over the fact that Flash has highly asymmetric read/write behavior.
Unless they fancy the idea of trying to recast themselves as semiconductor companies all of a sudden, the HDD guys are doing pretty much the most sensible thing available to them: running like hell in the direction of capacities that SSDs can't touch for less than a king's ransom.
And Firefox wouldn't work? If the machine still works for what you need to do, then you don't need to upgrade for the sake of upgrading. If it doesn't meet your needs anymore, then why complain about upgrading?
Vendor support doesn't dictate what use you can get out of a machine. I have friends who are still running OS 9 (eek) on a G3, because it does what they need it to.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Why can't we just move on and apply the sweet R&D money on the SSDs?
They are.
I guess that the "classic" hard drives will reach some sort of physical limit sometime in the (not so distant) future.
Of course they will. But at that point they'll start talking about alternative form factors if they can't squeeze more bits into the same space.
Why won't the big boys start to work hard on the SSDs?
They are. The problem is that they're still expensive to manufacture and they still need to pay off their R&D.
It's almost as reading a headline like this "New awesome floppies will be released in a new 10 MB size! - 'USB flash disks are overrated and expensive, nothing beats a good old floppy disk' a spokesperson for a floppy disk manufacturer said"
More like "New awesome floppies will be released in 500MB size and cost 10 bucks a pop" circa 2002 when 128MB USB flash disks cost nearly $100. the proportions might be off, but ultimately flash media outran the floppy disk 'cuz it quickly outpaced it in cost/MB, transfer rates were dog slow, and they were incredibly unreliable. Note that in 2010, I bought a 250GB external hard drive for $50 at Wal-Mart, whereas a 256GB flash drive costs over $800 on Newegg. A 1TB Seagate spinning platter drive costs $85 on Newegg, wheras 1TB of OCZ flash memory costs over $3,000 and is the highest I've seen commercially avaialable. I personally don't mind saving $2,915 by using an older technology.
Some dude had to buy a perfectly good Mac G4, just because Apple stopped supporting it, and its ancient Safari 2 browser could no longer render the web properly.
What price? He bought hardware that got old. It wasn't new enough to run the latest version of Mac OS X. He had many other options. He could have upgraded to Safari 3.0 which was supported on his machine. He may have been able to install Leopard with a new version of Safari. He could have moved to Firefox. He could have moved to Linux. He had plenty of options, I'm not sure why he didn't take any of them.
As far as being able to upgrade the hardware, most things in an iMac G4 are perfectly upgradable, however, the CPU isn't. This is true of most all in one computers and laptops. I don't see anything implicitly Apple about any of this.
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.
Am I the only one who misread this as "Senate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive"? I didn't even know that machines could be nominated to the Supreme Court!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I just checked my Powerbook, and it has Safari 4.0.4 (great version number for a web browser) running on OS X 10.4. I just ran Software Update, and 4.0.5 is in the queue. So, as per usual, you are talking complete nonsense. Oh, and for reference, that machine is 7 years old. It also has an iTunes update in the Software Update queue.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News