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."

Comments

does it work with Windows 98?

[alen]

i have to know because i have a Win98 PC that i use to play some old games and i wanted to upgrade it

Re:does it work with Windows 98?

[aardwolf64]

I think you could probably install EVERY game from the 90s on that hard drive and still have 2.09 TB left over. :-)

2TB with 512-byte sectors

[crow]

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?

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[larry bagina]

most file systems already use a 4k sector.

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[maxume]

Yeah, you would only be able to store 800 million of your oddly small files on this new drive. What a disaster.

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[twidarkling]

Seriously? If you've got a 3TB drive, are you seriously suggesting a person be counting wasted bytes? You lose more space than what you're suggesting just in the conversion from "vendor measurement" to "OS measurement" of space on the disk.

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Linux can handle it just fine

[basketcase]

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.

Re:Linux can handle it just fine

[danomac]

You can also create a filesystem on the device without partitioning it. (create a filesystem on /dev/sda instead of /dev/sda1.) No worries about partitioning problems then. I did this on a 3 TB array.

Re:Linux can handle it just fine

[Hal_Porter]

The Bios doesn't know anything about partitioning. It only knows it needs to read sector 0 of a disk into memory at 0x7c00 and jump to it. If the disk is MBR partitioned that's the MBR and the code there knows how to scan the partition table, and load the boot sector of the partition table using INT 13h. If it's not partitioned sector 0 is the boot sector of the partition table already and will use INT 13h to load the OS boot loader.

GPT is different because sector 0 contains a "Protective MBR" that just reserves the whole disk. That doesn't contain any code - EFI Bioses need to read boot code from a special FAT formatted partition (Macs apparently use HFS+ instead). EFI Bioses offer a much more complicated API than the Bios, which is good in some ways (flexibility) and bad in others (more chance of bugs).

But non partitioned disks have always been supported. In fact floppy disks are always non partitioned.

Actually it's a shame that sector 0 of an GPT disk doesn't contain code to load a boot manager that understands GPT to allow booting from a GPT disk with an old fashioned Bios. Or that some way for old style Bioses to boot from disks with a partition table with 64 bit LBAs in wasn't developed - MBR partitioning only has space for 32 bit LBAs. Which means no support for disks bigger than 2TB.

Not a huge deal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mac OS X

[commodore64_love]

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.)

How long can the growth last?

[alvinrod]

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?

Re:How long can the growth last?

[0123456]

Without multi-core, Moore's law would have ended recently.

Since Moore's law is about the number of transistors on a die and nothing to do with performance (except to the extent that more transistors allows higher performance), multiple cores are irrelevant: we could be running Pentium-4s with 16MB of cache instead of hexa-cores with 12MB of cache and Moore's Law would be just as valid.

Re:How long can the growth last?

[kimvette]

I'm just interested in how much longer we can expect to see capacity gains like this.

Do you know how long that question has been asked, and how many times "theoretical limits" would be reached within a year at the current rate, and each time, new techniques have been developed which increase density many times more than anyone previously imagined? I think storage density will be increasing for that much longer.

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? The capacity we have nowadays is staggering, and when back when you had your 320MB to 512MB hard drive and were thinking "I'll never fill this up" only a few were bothering with MP3s and PVR technologies (I bought my first video capture/TV tuner card around that time) and I'll bet few ever fathomed that a user could fill terabytes' worth of hard drives. Now it's cheap to build home recording studios, or even engage in amateur independent movie production with only a few hundred dollars' worth of equipment, running free software.

It's amazing, and with storage capacity growth increasing (not decreasing) we'll find new ways to fill up the storage media, very likely doing things we haven't anticipated even today.

Re:How long can the growth last?

[gemada]

as long as there is porn, the growth will continue (pun intended)

Re:3TB - that's all you'll ever need!

[The MAZZTer]

Yes, "documents".

Re:Mac OS X

[M8e]

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.