Seagate Releases 3TB External Drive for $250

Ugh. Seriously? by Pojut · 2010-06-29 01:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

Why is it external? Does anyone know if this thing uses a standard 3.5" hard drive (i.e. is it just an enclosure stuffed with a 3.5" drive), or is it a "proprietary" external?

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Living With a Nerd

One drive are two? by Snowhare · 2010-06-29 01:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

External RAID arrays have been around for a while. Is this just a conventional RAID0 or really a 3 TB single drive?

Re:One drive are two? by DIplomatic · 2010-06-29 01:34 · Score: 1

External RAID arrays have been around for a while. Is this just a conventional RAID0 or really a 3 TB single drive?
FTFA "This makes it the largest 3.5-inch in its class". It is one drive.
Re:One drive are two? by Snowhare · 2010-06-29 01:36 · Score: 1

That isn't clear. They seem to be using 3.5" as a measurement of the external case size.
Re:One drive are two? by sarkeizen · 2010-06-29 01:40 · Score: 2, Interesting

Oh someone at engadget said so...well that can't be in error... Anyway unless they opened it up or Seagate states somewhere on their web page that it is a single drive. It seems reasonable to remain skeptical. It seems weird that Seagate would release an external drive without trying to capitalize on the drive inside...I would figure the market for internal 3TB drives is bigger than external ones.
Re:One drive are two? by ruiner13 · 2010-06-29 01:43 · Score: 3, Insightful

If only there were something linked to this slashvertisement that could provide your answer....

Hmmm.... or even the summary, which implies it is a single drive.

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today is spelling optional day.
Re:One drive are two? by sarkeizen · 2010-06-29 01:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'll comment on my own comment...one thing that is interesting is the physical dimensions of the box:

6 x 5 x 2

considering that seagates 3.5" drives are approximately:

1 x 4 x 6

Which seems to eliminate the possibility that this is two 3.5 drives. It could still be multiple 2.5" drives but without looking at pricing I'm not sure how feasible that is (and I don't think Seagate is shipping 1TB 2.5's yet)
Re:One drive are two? by Dancindan84 · 2010-06-29 01:55 · Score: 3, Informative

The picture is a Seagate Goflex (and Seagate's website is now listing 3GB desktop GoFlex drives), which as far as I can find are just standard SATA drives in an enclosure that use Seagate's GoFlex interface for their connection. Relevant Link

So if people are just interested in the drive they can crack the case and get it. Also, according to the above link the GoFlex connection thingy will work for any SATA drive, so you can use it like a HDD hot swap docking station of sorts.

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"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Re:One drive are two? by Snowhare · 2010-06-29 02:03 · Score: 2, Interesting

Dammit. I had a nicely linked response all written. And then I clicked on one of my own links in the preview. Sigh.
Ok. I actually did read TFA before I posted (having long since learned not to trust Slashdot headlines ;) ).
I have now visited Seagate's own tech pageon the drives. They do not clearly state anywhere that it is a single drive inside the case. But you can infer that from the external case dimensions of 6.22 in x 4.88 in x 1.73 in that there isn't enough room for two 3.5" drives.
Having been in this business for a long time I have learned that if you don't ask the right questions computer manufacturers will happily sell you a 'pig in a poke'.
Re:One drive are two? by Snowhare · 2010-06-29 02:13 · Score: 3, Interesting

Someone else suggested that they may be using the lower expectations of the external USB hard drive market (slower drives) to launch a drive that isn't 'up to snuff' performance wise for traditional internal drive use. Nowhere on their web pages for the drive do they give any performance numbers.
That may be the 'pig in a poke' aspect here. It may be a really big, but really slow drive.
Re:One drive are two? by DarkKnightRadick · 2010-06-29 02:23 · Score: 1

Only 3GB? Nothing impressive there.

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"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Re:One drive are two? by sarkeizen · 2010-06-29 02:30 · Score: 2, Interesting

Perhaps so but the dichotomy of fast/slow drives has existed on the bare drive market for a while. I'm not discounting it being a 3TB drive and as seagate said in the other article they are planning on shipping the 3TB drives this year.

One thing it could be doing isn't utilizing "lower expectation" but rather "lower demand". If the USB market is, as I suspect significantly smaller than the bare drive market then it might be a good place to start shipping in order to ramp up production or even work out some bugs. To avoid the problems they had with their other groundbreaking drive the 1.5TB!
Re:One drive are two? by Dancindan84 · 2010-06-29 02:36 · Score: 2, Funny

Sorry, I was daydreaming about 1996... >.>

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"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Re:One drive are two? by demonbug · 2010-06-29 04:22 · Score: 1

I'll comment on my own comment...one thing that is interesting is the physical dimensions of the box:
6 x 5 x 2
considering that seagates 3.5" drives are approximately:
1 x 4 x 6
Which seems to eliminate the possibility that this is two 3.5 drives. It could still be multiple 2.5" drives but without looking at pricing I'm not sure how feasible that is (and I don't think Seagate is shipping 1TB 2.5's yet)
Given the dimensions you quote, I think your analysis is 100% wrong. If you put two 1 x 4 x 6 drives together on end the dimensions would be 1 x 4 x 12. On an edge, you would get 1 x 8 x 6. But if you stacked them, the dimensions would be 2 x 4 x 6. You state that the enclosure is 2 x 5 x 6. Now I don't know if this is the case, but that would pretty clearly seem to imply that this drive is two ordinary 3.5" drives in an enclosure - the dimensions work out perfectly. Not sure why you thought those dimensions precluded this being two 3.5" drives.
Re:One drive are two? by sarkeizen · 2010-06-29 12:24 · Score: 1

Couple of things:

1) The figures I gave are rounded the exact figures make your conclusion difficult:

HWL Drive: 1.028 x 4.000 x 5.787 HWL Case: 6.22 x 4.88 x 1.73

Possible configurations of stacking two (with zero space between):

2.056 x 4.000 x 5.787 1.028 x 8.000 x 5.787 1.028 x 4.000 x 11.574

2) Considering that the measurements are all OUTER even if my original measurements were exactly right. It would still preclude placement of the drives. Since something that contains something needs to be at least slightly larger on the inside.

3) If you are stacking two drives together it isn't unreasonable to expect some space between the two for airflow.

What's interesting about your analysis - which turns out to be 100% wrong - ironically . Is that your conclusions weren't based simply on my stated figures - you had to also assume there was some error but you assumed the error was in your favor.
Re:One drive are two? by DarkKnightRadick · 2010-06-29 13:21 · Score: 1

It's all good. For the longest time I ran only 500MB (and that was at first Win95 with Windows Entertainment Pack, then a full install of RH6.2)

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"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Re:One drive are two? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 15:07 · Score: 0

But would it be room enough for 2 or more smaller drives?
You'd fit 2-3 of the 2.5" drives in there, and as many as 20 of the 1.8" drives

That's a Whole lot by Theoboley · 2010-06-29 01:32 · Score: 2, Funny

a whole lot of Pr0n

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Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try

Re:That's a Whole lot by tehcyder · 2010-06-29 01:45 · Score: 0

I wonder what the total volume of (unique) pr0n on the internet is?
I'm sure someone on slashdot has most of it anyway.

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To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Re:That's a Whole lot by Theoboley · 2010-06-29 02:16 · Score: 2, Informative

You'd need a Beowulf cluster of these to contain it all.

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Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Re:That's a Whole lot by X0563511 · 2010-06-29 06:18 · Score: 1

I don't think Beowulf clustering works for storage.
Perhaps a Beowulf cluster of storage servers utilizing these?

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For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Re:That's a Whole lot by Theoboley · 2010-06-29 06:57 · Score: 1

i like my way better... As non-working as it may be, Mr. Pedantic.

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Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try

A lot of eggs in one basket... by Andrewkov · 2010-06-29 01:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

That's more capacity than my entire four-drive RAID for just $250.

Yeah, but which would you trust more with your data.

Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:37 · Score: 0

Yeah, but which would you trust more with your data.
Well that depends if its raid-0 we're comparing here.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:38 · Score: 1, Insightful

Given Seagate's recent QC problems, not dis.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by MBGMorden · 2010-06-29 01:44 · Score: 1

Better solution - redo the RAID array with the 3TB drives. Capacity + failover.
My only bit of paranoia is that with these humongous drives is that I can fit more data on them, which is even more data that could be lost in the event of a failure.
With this much storage space I'm almost thinking that it would be beneficial to move from RAID5 to RAID6 just for the extra peace of mind. Sure you lose quite a bit of storage space, but I'm getting to the point now where I want my bits to be safe as much as I want to store more of them.

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"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Inda · 2010-06-29 01:46 · Score: 1

I used to trust my 10gb hard drive with all my data...

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This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by hibiki_r · 2010-06-29 02:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

RAID is not a very good failover system. It never was, and it never will. Disks on raid often have extremely similar use patterns, leading to very similar drive life. When one drive in a RAID dies, it's not uncommon to see one or two more die at nearly the same time.
Real failover comes from offline backups. RAID wins at providing improved IO with little setup cost: You'll be hard pressed to find a modern DB server under a significant read and write load that isn't using RAID 10 either directly or on a SAN to improve its IO throughput.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by isama · 2010-06-29 02:08 · Score: 0

i'd suggest you read this: baarf.org
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by hedwards · 2010-06-29 02:12 · Score: 1

That's a toughy. But, really it isn't. You're better off with a single drive and proper backups. Sure you should do backups either way, but RAID tends not to be as reliable as folks suggest. If you're going to do it, at least go software RAID so that you don't have to worry about having a back up controller and worrying if that works. On top of that you've got to worry about user errors where you accidentally type things in wrong and end up nuking a good disk trying to replace a bad one.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 02:13 · Score: 0

RAID5 only allows you to lose one drive in the array, and performance will be degraded. RAID6 allows you to lose two. I prefer my servers to have a 3 drive mirrored array - they make better sense in my mind, since I don't have a need for more than 500GB of storage, with the total load per server only growing about 10GB a year. I want a little time to shut my machine down and replace a dead drive - we've all heard stories about drives that fail on an array rebuild.
Remember, RAID is for uptime. Backups are for safekeeping.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by sunspot42 · 2010-06-29 02:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

If you're going to do it, at least go software RAID so that you don't have to worry about having a back up controller and worrying if that works.
Uh, bad idea. If your array is corrupted and you can't boot into the OS, your software RAID array could become totally inaccessible. I had this happen on an XP box with one of Intel's crappy hardware/software RAID arrays. Box couldn't boot, array was corrupted, and my slipstreamed XP disc didn't have the drivers required to run on my SATA DVD drive. Whoops!
Instead of buying an EIDE DVD drive, which would have worked with my XP disc, I ended up just upgrading to Win 7, which did work with the SATA DVD drive and which recognized and rebuilt the array. Still, it was a huge hassle and about a $100 expense.
Never again. If I ever bother with RAID in the future, it'll be with a (popular) hardware RAID controller. No more Winmodem-esque RAID solutions for me, thank you. But I honestly think RAID is a waste of time for home machines. You'd be better off spending that money on offsite backup solutions like CrashPlan.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by MBGMorden · 2010-06-29 02:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

RAID is not a very good failover system. It never was, and it never will. Disks on raid often have extremely similar use patterns, leading to very similar drive life. When one drive in a RAID dies, it's not uncommon to see one or two more die at nearly the same time.
Real failover comes from offline backups.
While true, you have to look at it from a practical standpoint. I admin several database servers at work, and they get full offline (and off-site) backups of their data via LTO3 tapes. At home though, the investment in tape drives and and media is simply cost prohibitive. A decent RAID5 array using FreeNAS (or even one of the ready-built D-Link NAS units, which I have owned as well) is relatively inexpensive overall.
With a decent RAID array I can have several terabytes of storage (my current largest array in a RAID5 config allows me nearly 3TB). Now, since tape drives are out, the only sane offline backup option I have is DVD's. Dual layer discs are simply too expensive to use (and I've not had great luck with their reliability), so I'm limited to backing up my data 4.7GB at a time. To backup that entire array ONCE, assuming never changing data, is going to take ~600 DVD's. If you assume 5 minutes spent per disc burning them then we're talking 50 straight hours of disc burning to get a full backup, and THEN having to keep on doing this as data changes.
For a home user with a lot of data, this just isn't feasible. Instead, I have to prioritize my data. EVERYTHING I want to keep, but realistically I don't NEED to keep it all. So, I have 1 or 2 directories that I keep important stuff in. Tax returns, pictures of family that are irreplaceable, invoices/receipts from big purchases, etc. Those do get backed up to DVD every now and then. They also more importantly get synced to my Dropbox account so that I have them off-site.
For the vast majority of it though, it's simply to big to make regular offline backups. For that, a RAID array is most certainly better than keeping it all on single drives with NO failover whatsoever. I can live with the possibility that I MIGHT lose that data, but the risks are still greatly reduced.

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"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by XanC · 2010-06-29 02:45 · Score: 3, Insightful

That was exactly his point. Your RAID required a particular piece of hardware. He suggested software RAID. Yours was some kind of awful hybrid. If you'd been using a real OS and real software RAID, you'd have had no problem.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 03:00 · Score: 0

Backups aren't always the best way to go. For example: I have a mythtv setup that records and deletes TV shows continuously. I choose to watch some of it every now and then. I have it so that I can have a choise and I love it, but it's recording and deleting at such a rate that backups wouldn't be able to keep up. Perhaps an on-line mirror would keep up, but then raid will do the same job better for less money. Raid6 solves the problem you refer to in your last sentence, and the double-failure issue that was the main problem with Raid5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by drsmithy · 2010-06-29 03:03 · Score: 1

With this much storage space I'm almost thinking that it would be beneficial to move from RAID5 to RAID6 just for the extra peace of mind.
If you've got drives >=500GB and you're not already using RAID6, you're a braver man than I.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Robert+Zenz · 2010-06-29 03:08 · Score: 1

I used to trust my 10gb hard drive with all my data...
Used to?
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Big+Boss · 2010-06-29 03:10 · Score: 1

So you build a bigger server for the primary, and demote the old disks to backup duty. :)
As mentioned, RAID is better than nothing. Particularly with a good filesystem like ZFS. Another RAID to store copies of all the really important data on another server, preferably offsite, and your backup is quite good. Snapshots and/or a versioning backup app to handle things like the user deleting or changing a file and wanting the old version back, and you're in pretty good shape.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by drsmithy · 2010-06-29 03:11 · Score: 4, Informative

RAID is not a very good failover system. It never was, and it never will. Disks on raid often have extremely similar use patterns, leading to very similar drive life. When one drive in a RAID dies, it's not uncommon to see one or two more die at nearly the same time.
We have enough disks to lose one or two a month in our systems, and I'd have to say that a dual-disk failure in the same system is pretty uncommon.
Real failover comes from offline backups.
That's called disaster recovery, not "failover".
RAID is a reliability solution first, performance solution second (albeit a close second). It does an excellent job at that, unless you Do It Wrong (RAID5s with double-digit spindle counts and/or no hotspares, using RAID 0+1 instead of 1+0, running for extended periods of time with a degraded array, etc).
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by deepestblue · 2010-06-29 04:05 · Score: 1

Eh, neither. RAID != backup.
The only way out is backups, at which point RAID doesn't give you any extra data security.
RAID is for performance.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by magus_melchior · 2010-06-29 04:15 · Score: 1

Depends on the array-- A RAID-5 or a RAID-1 variant would be fine, but a RAID-0 (which is fairly common for those looking for cheap speed boosts to their OS) would be about as reliable as this external drive.

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"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by hedwards · 2010-06-29 04:36 · Score: 1

Indubitably, while software RAID doesn't solve the problem of fat fingers, it does at least ensure that you can boot up a live cd and get your data, or disconnect the drives and reinstall the OS.

But really you have to properly label all the disks, preferably both in the on disk label and physically on the hard disk. That's kind of a pain, but it greatly reduces the likelihood of pulling the wrong disk.

Personally, I've never had problems with software RAID which weren't completely my fault. A good solution like zmirror or RAIDZ is nice as you can access it via several different OSes assuming that you're using a common denominator revision.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Pentium100 · 2010-06-29 04:49 · Score: 1

At home though, the investment in tape drives and and media is simply cost prohibitive.
I bought a used LTO2 tape drive for ~$180, but I use it primarily for archiving. I back up really important data, but backing up 3TB would be difficult and expensive. However, most of the data is replaceable and split to 10 hard drives (no RAID or anything, just 10 drives, though I would like a way to make them appear as a single drive letter at least for reading the files), so, even a complete failure of one drive would not take out all of the data.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:52 · Score: 0

You should be using Crashplan for your crit data. Nightly, offsite, encrypted backups.
Can't beat it.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:59 · Score: 1, Interesting

Now, since tape drives are out, the only sane offline backup option I have is DVD's. Dual layer discs are simply too expensive to use (and I've not had great luck with their reliability), so I'm limited to backing up my data 4.7GB at a time.

Well, I use an external USB drive for offline backup. I only have it plugged in when I'm doing a backup and capacity isn't an issue. If I was even more concerned about my data, I'd use two; keep one offsite (parents) and rotate them periodically.
A 3TB external drive would be a handy backup option for a 3TB RAID array.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Andrewkov · 2010-06-29 05:01 · Score: 1

No, raid is for uptime more than performance, imho.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by spire3661 · 2010-06-29 05:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

RAID is not peace of mind. Regular scheduled backups, with offsite storage, and tested recovery procedures is peace of mind. Its not considered backed up until your data been successfully restored from a backup.

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Good-bye
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by spire3661 · 2010-06-29 05:35 · Score: 1

Uptime is a performance measurement is it not?

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Good-bye
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by drsmithy · 2010-06-29 06:47 · Score: 1

RAID is not peace of mind. Regular scheduled backups, with offsite storage, and tested recovery procedures is peace of mind. Its not considered backed up until your data been successfully restored from a backup.
Er, yes. Relevance to my comment being what, exactly ?
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by dotgain · 2010-06-29 07:01 · Score: 1

That's what she said.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by cstdenis · 2010-06-29 07:07 · Score: 1

That may be increasingly true today, but SSD that is fast enough to matter is pretty new, and a raid if spinning disks was the main option before them.
And of course you can always raid SSD. I have a database server running on a raid10 of SSD. Sadly raid cards complicate things a bit for ssd since few if any support trim, but in time it will come.
RAID itself isn't going anywhere as a performance option.

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1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by drsmithy · 2010-06-29 07:24 · Score: 1

But really you have to properly label all the disks, preferably both in the on disk label and physically on the hard disk. That's kind of a pain, but it greatly reduces the likelihood of pulling the wrong disk.
I'm not aware of any remotely up-to-date software RAID system that requires the disks to be in the same order.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by drsmithy · 2010-06-29 07:27 · Score: 1

RAID is for performance.
RAID is primarily about availability. The performance improvements are a nice side benefit.
To address your first point, RPOs and RTOs are _not_ the same thing as system availability. Backups address the former, RAID the latter.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by dch24 · 2010-06-29 08:16 · Score: 2

Pulling the disk

Uh, let me just say that one more time... pulling the disk

Ok? It's not that he decided in a fit of insanity to yank out his existing machine, but move all the drives to a new controller. Yeah, the GGGP talked about replacing the controller.

But the GP was saying: if you haven't labelled the disk, you'll pull the wrong one while trying to hunt down the failed one.

At which point all kinds of bad happen.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by Kjella · 2010-06-29 09:13 · Score: 1

For the vast majority of it though, it's simply to big to make regular offline backups. For that, a RAID array is most certainly better than keeping it all on single drives with NO failover whatsoever. I can live with the possibility that I MIGHT lose that data, but the risks are still greatly reduced.
One alternative is to drop RAID and manually manage the redundancy yourself. I have a lot of things that are available online - it'd just be a pain to download all of it again. In fact, some of them you can now get in quite superior bluray encode complete series with very little work. I've decided to just go with JBOD on that and have proper backups of the really, really important stuff and copy-paste the folder to another drive if it's semi-important. That also means you can quickly prioritize if you just lose a drive what to save first. I've worked with RAID5. I've had RAID5 fail on me as one drive became wonky and one failed completely, meaning bye-bye the entire array as every attempt at recovery would fail. Never again, if I ever bothered it'd be a straight RAID1 array spanning many disks just to try preserving it online without going to offsite backup. RAID to me is a high availability feature, and it's just not very useful in a home setting. Either you're fine with the single disk reliability, or you need real disaster recovery (not just RAID but accidental delete/overwrite, theft, fire, whatever). Your requirements may vary but I think that's very typical.

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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by dannys42 · 2010-06-29 09:39 · Score: 1

Nice distinction. I think people tend to forget that.
However, RAID has a huge failing in reliability. Every single time I've had a failure in a RAID setup, it was due to the controller -- your new single point of failure. But there's no standard (even for mirrored data) for the data on disk. So that means in a hardware RAID solution, you're rather screwed when the controller fails (unless you happened to have bought 2 -- firmware updates negate the possibility of purchasing in the future; I've run into that problem).
The best solution I've found in terms of reliability is Linux Software RAID. Then you don't have those sorts of problems.
What I find interesting is that no one comments on this problem. The cheapo NAS devices typically use Linux, and probably even software RAID. I'd think they'd taught this in their marketing. But they tend to keep quiet about such things.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by sarkeizen · 2010-06-29 12:37 · Score: 1

RAID is not a very good failover system. It never was, and it never will. Disks on raid often have extremely similar use patterns, leading to very similar drive life. When one drive in a RAID dies, it's not uncommon to see one or two more die at nearly the same time.

I rarely use the word "failover" that way but if you mean "fault-tolerant" then I'd rather like to see some objective data bearing your thesis out. I'd agree that many people assume RAID does more than it does but what you're saying stretches credibility - unless you are talking at either the far left or right side of the curve (not to mention you haven't defined 'not uncommon' - I'd assume you mean that you have a better chance than 1 in a few hundred or 'nearly the same time' which to me would imply 'faster than a service tech could reach the drive' i.e. 72 hrs). It seems more reasonable to assume that premature failure is the result of manufacturing weaknesses and outside of a batch problem will converge to some kind of normal distribution.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by drsmithy · 2010-06-29 12:40 · Score: 1

However, RAID has a huge failing in reliability. Every single time I've had a failure in a RAID setup, it was due to the controller -- your new single point of failure.
You're either incredibly lucky (to have never seen a disk failure) or incredibly unlucky (to have seen multiple controller failures so soon in your career).
But there's no standard (even for mirrored data) for the data on disk. So that means in a hardware RAID solution, you're rather screwed when the controller fails (unless you happened to have bought 2 -- firmware updates negate the possibility of purchasing in the future; I've run into that problem).
This is why you buy decent hardware, where the vendor will support you (and provide spares) for 3-5 years.
What I find interesting is that no one comments on this problem. The cheapo NAS devices typically use Linux, and probably even software RAID. I'd think they'd taught this in their marketing. But they tend to keep quiet about such things.
Controller failures are a vanishingly small proportion of events, especially when you're not buying cheap crap. In the last decade, I can only recall it happening 3 times, over thousands of systems I would have touched in that timeframe (and all of which had the vendor replace the controller with an identical one within a day). Disk failures - well, I see them a couple of times a _month_.
Regardless, the point of RAID is to keep data available. If a controller fails (unless you have multiple controllers and multipathing - pretty uncommon with local storage), then it's already failed at that - so whether or not you can get and identical replacement controller or not is a relatively minor issue, because you should be looking to your backups.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by mjwx · 2010-06-29 13:46 · Score: 1

We have enough disks to lose one or two a month in our systems, and I'd have to say that a dual-disk failure in the same system is pretty uncommon.

The biggest risk with RAID is the controller, lose that and you're screwed. After that you have the fact that you are using identical disks in most arrays. Same batch number in many cases and I think this is what the GP was referring to in the case of a bad batch of drives. But still your point stands, a simultaneous failure is extremely unlikely but this is what disaster recovery is for. If you absolutely need five nines of uptime then you not only have redundant controllers, you have redundant arrays on separate bits of HW. RAID is, as you said a reliability solution, not a backup solutions and personally I prefer RAID 6 just in case of a multiple disk failure.

But five nines is way beyond the requirements of a home user, I'd get a 2 TB external drive/NAS and RSync it. No one wants to lose their pr0n collection.

--
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by toddestan · 2010-06-29 14:06 · Score: 1

Or people who need a lot of IO-intensive storage. Or people running systems that are more than about a year or two old.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by PiSkyHi · 2010-06-29 16:23 · Score: 1

I'm sorry I lost you at software RAID on XP.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by dannys42 · 2010-06-29 18:58 · Score: 1

The SCSI controller I had was DPT, and it was probably 3 years old at the time (this was a good number of years ago). But fortunately I was able to call them up and they were able to supply me with the correct firmware. But the lesson was learned. Later on we had an Intel Vortex controller... again we had some issues with the controller. Granted I never saw data loss. But with every controller (either the cheapos or pricier options) they at some point just stopped working in a way where we had a big scare, but I was eventually able to recover.
We were a smaller shop, but by the end of my stay at that company we had a couple of 12 drive arrays hosting data for about 50 people. Not huge by any measure... and eventually I think I did see a disk error. But as I said, most of it was hardware controllers. And given our size, to have gone through so many controllers, that really tells me something about the reliability of those things. I think we went through at least the 2 different SCSI RAID controllers and 4 different IDE controllers in my 10 years there.
These days you can't really say "purchase a decent controller" because it's built into the BIOS of may systems. Lots of home users now feel they have the benefits of RAID. Little do they know in the event of a m/b problem (or heck maybe even migration), their drives are useless.
As I said, Linux Software RAID completely solves this problem. If the controller dies on you, no big deal. Put it in another computer and Linux will continue to read it. No need to wait to restore from your backups.
(Aside: I do seem to find weird issues with IBM hardware and IDE disks running Linux. There are some cases where you can get data corruption with 0 errors reported by the hardware and nothing in the system logs. I guess I'm just lucky).
If you want to have a better chance at saving your data also make sure to buy your drives from different distributors so you're ensured their from different batches. I even try to make sure they're different vendors. Most people think that's crazy for performance reasons or whatnot. But in my case I cared more about data integrity.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by sunspot42 · 2010-07-03 12:28 · Score: 1

XP has supported software RAID for some time, but it has limits, and Intel's hybrid approach was substantially faster (although, as it turns out, a huge PITA when it failed under those circumstances).
Software RAID is still tied to a particular piece of software, though. I don't see how this necessarily leaves you any better off in the event of some kind of major RAID failure. You'll still need to have the correct software & drivers to boot your system and recover your RAID array.
RAID adds lots of complexity for the home user, and it doesn't seem to offer any substantial benefits in terms of data security. You get enhanced performance with certain RAID schemes, which may be important to a select group of users, but that's about it.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by MBGMorden · 2010-06-29 01:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

Same thing I immediately thought. 3GB by itself is simply not interesting. What I'd be much MORE interested in is taking 4 of these things and putting them into my FreeNAS RAID setup (which is currently running 1GB drives).

I've had too many drive failures over the years to trust anything too valuable to a single drive.

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"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain

Meh by jridley · 2010-06-29 01:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

Call me when price is comparable per GB to 1.5T drives. They're about $90, so when the 3T is $180, it starts to become interesting. I'd have to go to RAID 6 to fold 3Ts into my array of 1.5Ts though.

Re:Meh by qoncept · 2010-06-29 02:17 · Score: 1

Big news! The biggest, newest hard drive isn't the best deal around! Spare us your insight. A new capacity hard drive coming out may not be earth shattering news, but 3tb drives weren't becoming more affordable yesterday.

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Whale
Re:Meh by ibwolf · 2010-06-29 02:40 · Score: 1

Call me when price is comparable per GB to 1.5T drives. They're about $90, so when the 3T is $180, it starts to become interesting. I'd have to go to RAID 6 to fold 3Ts into my array of 1.5Ts though.
Of course by the time these 3TB drives are priced at $180 the 1.5TB drives will be down to $65, and when the 3TB drives match that at $130 the 1.5TB will be down to $55. I'd imagine that the 3TB will not offer more "bang for your buck" until they drop to approx. $100 (or in other words a little more then the current optimum priced drives).
Re:Meh by 0100010001010011 · 2010-06-29 02:44 · Score: 1

Storage Tracker
You can get 2TB for $90, (21.980437 GB/$). For this to be competitive, it'd need to cost $140.
Re:Meh by genghisjahn · 2010-06-29 02:47 · Score: 1

Hello! I'm your friendly Seagate Rep lurking on the slashdots. Please post your phone number so that I can call you as soon as the price is right for you. In the mean time I'd love to talk with you about other products we offer. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

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Re:Meh by torkus · 2010-06-29 03:00 · Score: 1

And not only that, but $250 is the announced retail.
Comparing a good sale price to MSRP is rather misleading, donchathink?
Unlike Apple hardware and gaming consoles, the rest of the industry doesn't get away with price fixing. Expect $250 MSRP to translate into ~$225 retail pricing to start...if not lower. I can definitely see this drive pushing under $200 pretty quickly.
Someone should let Intel know that their top of the line CPUs are too expensive compared to the next tier lower :)

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Re:Meh by Ost99 · 2010-06-29 05:14 · Score: 1

That's only true if you set the price of a hd slot and sata connector to $0. If you're only getting one or two disks $0 might be correct.
If you're filling up hotswap bays and sata connectors on raid controllers the per slot price will can be anything from $20 to *a lot*.
The slot price in my homeserver is about $70. That made it cheaper for me to get 1.5TB drives back when they cost twice as much as 1TB drives. The NAS at my parents place has a per slot price of $125. This is all consumer grade equipment. For enterprise use the per slot price could be much higher (not that you'd want to the drive from the story in such a setup).

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---- Sig. gone.
Re:Meh by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 06:42 · Score: 0

The disks in that price range are "open box" returns and "recertified" (aka failed under warranty and refurbished at the factory).
It even says so on right on the link you posted.
Re:Meh by dch24 · 2010-06-29 08:18 · Score: 2

Extra bonus points for linking through the Coral CDN (nyud.net). +1
Re:Meh by BikeHelmet · 2010-06-30 12:46 · Score: 1

Call me when price is comparable per GB to 1.5T drives. They're about $90, so when the 3T is $180, it starts to become interesting.
Spend the extra $15 and get some 2GB drives for $105.
Re:Meh by jridley · 2010-07-05 04:55 · Score: 1

My RAID5 array is comprised of 1.5T drives, 7 of them. There's no easy way to fold 2T drives into that. 3Ts I could do if I switched to RAID6 and partitioned the 3T into two 1.5T partitions.

Buy two by Nichotin · 2010-06-29 01:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

What I figured with these huge capacity drives, is that it takes so long to fill them that if they crash, it is a real nuisance almost no matter what is on them. Let's say you fill them with movies you downloaded from bittorrent. If you don't have a decent connection it can take months to download the same movies. And even if you can do a steady 5MB/s, you still have to account for all the time it takes to find back whatever you had previously from public or private trackers.

All I am saying, is that because of these huge capacity drives, I tend to go for at least raid 1. The time spent working to earn enough to purchase an extra drive (or two+ for raid 5), pretty much makes up for the time to acquire the same material if I only had one drive and it failed.

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Dvorak on Doomtech

Re:Buy two by hedwards · 2010-06-29 01:45 · Score: 1, Interesting

That's true, however, what I'd recommend is partitioning them into smaller segments anyways. Main reason being that you really don't want a filesystem problem to take 3 tebibytes worth of data with it. The alternative though is to go with something like ZFS or probably any of the other copy on write filesystems out there they shouldn't be as sensitive as things like NTFS and the various FAT iterations.
Re:Buy two by dgatwood · 2010-06-29 02:00 · Score: 1
I can't speak for Windows, but speaking as a Mac OS X owner, I haven't seen filesystem corruption since about 10.2, nor Linux filesystem corruption since ext3 came out. If you're experiencing filesystem corruption with a filesystem, that means one of three things:
- The filesystem you are using is immature.
- The OS's VFS layer is immature.
- You have bad RAM or a bad CPU or ATA controller (or ATA drivers, I suppose).
That third one is not as uncommon as it sounds. Most filesystem corruption is caused by bad hardware. Hint: if software is crashing regularly, your filesystem is at risk.
I've lost half a dozen hard drives to mechanical failure since the last time I saw filesystem corruption (not counting an ancient ext2-based, 2.2-kernel-based box that has a few unlinked inodes and a truckload of zero dtime inodes every time it reboots, neither of which results in actual data loss).
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Re:Buy two by drinkypoo · 2010-06-29 02:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

I am still working on filling up my 1TB disk. I have a second one, and I rsync the first one to it periodically for the very same reason.
On the other hand, a 3TB disk would be a nice backup solution for a 4x750GB RAID0. And indeed, my plan for the next time I feel like spending money on my PC is to put a four-disk RAID in it, and to buy an external disk to which it can be backed up. Copy the array, edit the menu.lst, and grub-install, and you've got a bootable backup. Neat and sweet.
Finally, people doing video editing could definitely use a stripe of these disks as a working volume, using 1394 or USB3. (USB2 has too much processor overhead.)

--
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Re:Buy two by karnal · 2010-06-29 02:12 · Score: 1

I've had (in the AMD K6-2 days) a bad FLOPPY DRIVE CABLE somehow cause data corruption on an ATA disk when placed into UDMA mode. Just something weird that I ran into.

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Karnal
Re:Buy two by 1s44c · 2010-06-29 02:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

On the other hand, a 3TB disk would be a nice backup solution for a 4x750GB RAID0.
You are nuts. The unreliability of 750GB drives and the very long backup time would make your setup an exercise in pain.
Re:Buy two by b0bby · 2010-06-29 03:33 · Score: 1

The first rsync might take a while, but after that it shouldn't be too bad. A simple robocopy backup of 300GB or so on my main machine takes about 15mins for me. On a personal drive with 3TB of data, most isn't changing very often.
Re:Buy two by Blakey+Rat · 2010-06-29 03:42 · Score: 1

All I am saying, is that because of these huge capacity drives, I tend to go for at least raid 1.
RAID1 won't help you if you accidentally tell the computer to delete your whole collection. You're better off having two separate drives, and just writing a backup script to copy the contents of A to B every night at 3:00 AM or so.
(Use rsync, or robocopy on Windows, so you don't cause undue wear-and-tear on the drives. I actually do this using the new version of Mozy, which supports it, and also simultaneously uploads your data to their cloud-based storage. Highly recommended.)

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Comment of the year
Re:Buy two by hedwards · 2010-06-29 04:39 · Score: 1

I've personally had that trouble in recent memory running Ubuntu, I think it was 9.04 where I lost the entire partition several times. Actually once per boot. Wasn't an issue as I didn't have anything beyond the default install on there, but I did learn a valuable lesson about not doing such things.

I forget what specific filesystem I was using at the time, I suspect it was whatever the default was. The point though is that anytime you get a crash while the filesystem is mounted you run the risk of corruption taking the partition down. Newer filesystems like ZFS seem to have more or less eliminated the problem, I personally would not assume it to be the case whenever possible.
Re:Buy two by magus_melchior · 2010-06-29 05:03 · Score: 1

An alternative I can think of is "cold" backup (in this case, an infrequent backup made only when the drive is plugged in) or data archiving, assuming hard drives last longer when powered down.

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Re:Buy two by Pentium100 · 2010-06-29 05:15 · Score: 1

However, as someone who has 10 hard drives (total capacity is about 3TB) I can tell you that having a lot of drive letters is inconvenient (was that movie in J:, M:, N:, R:, S: or some other drive). I looked for some software that could combine them to one drive letter (without destroying the data), something like if I have two files M:\movies\movie1.avi and n;\movies\movie2.avi, I could just open, say, Z:\movies and see both files even though they are on separate drives, this could be read only as I could just write a file straight to a drive that has enough space, but for reading it would be much better. Didn't find anything, so I tried to make my own program, but could not understand how to create a shell namespace extension or a SMB server (assuming I could run it on Windows).
Re:Buy two by Pentium100 · 2010-06-29 05:21 · Score: 1

I have seen NTFS corruption in Windows, but it was due to a bad cable (1m IDE cables do not always work as intended, I lowered the transfer rate from 100MB/s to 66MB/s and have no more problems with that drive, once I had a bad USB cable that made a few sectors on my external drive unreadable - that was fun to figure out) or when my friend turned his computer off by unplugging it every day. NTFS is pretty good at keeping the file system structure intact, even when the PC crashes (especially if that happens due to a bad connection to the system drive, I probably have a few corrupt files on that one, but the file system is OK)
Re:Buy two by 1s44c · 2010-06-29 05:32 · Score: 1

The first rsync might take a while, but after that it shouldn't be too bad. A simple robocopy backup of 300GB or so on my main machine takes about 15mins for me. On a personal drive with 3TB of data, most isn't changing very often.
Rsync still has to stat every single file on both the source and target before it knows what data to copy. On 3TB of average sized files that's a very large number of seeks, a lot of used memory, and a lot of time.
Re:Buy two by b0bby · 2010-06-29 05:47 · Score: 1

You're right, but in some situations the time isn't too important. For example, I have an old 2.5" USB drive with a Truecrypt partition that I use for offsite backup. The controller in the USB case is flakey, and 95% of the time will only connect at USB 1 so it's slow as molasses. But once a month or so I set it to run overnight & I don't really care that it takes 12 hours to finish.
Re:Buy two by mikechant · 2010-06-29 21:47 · Score: 1

Rsync still has to stat every single file on both the source and target before it knows what data to copy. On 3TB of average sized files that's a very large number of seeks, a lot of used memory, and a lot of time.
My experience of using rsync from an internal 1TB SATA drive to an external USB2 1TB drive is that it only takes about 30-60s max to cross-check the files when there are no changes. I can't imagine 3TB would take more than a few minutes in the same situation.
Re:Buy two by 0111+1110 · 2010-06-30 02:34 · Score: 1

I looked for some software that could combine them to one drive letter (without destroying the data), something like if I have two files M:\movies\movie1.avi and n;\movies\movie2.avi, I could just open, say, Z:\movies and see both files even though they are on separate drives
FlexRAID

--
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Re:Buy two by Pentium100 · 2010-06-30 02:48 · Score: 1

Thanks, I'll try it.

RAID by dimethylxanthine · 2010-06-29 01:38 · Score: 0

Just for the note, RAID capacity is almost always smaller anyway, e.g. when mirroring/error checking is used, which is almost always the point.

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"If you tell me which evil scientist has stolen your brain I'll try to rescue it for you" - Capt. Obvious

Re:RAID by vegiVamp · 2010-06-29 02:03 · Score: 1

What do you mean, 'almost' ?

And, in case you're referring to "RAID 0" - the first letter of the acronym stands for Redundant, which 0 isn't.

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What a depressingly stupid machine.
Re:RAID by Ant+P. · 2010-06-29 03:44 · Score: 1

The last digit of the acronym makes clear how much redundancy it has. They knew what they were doing when naming these.
Re:RAID by vegiVamp · 2010-06-29 16:51 · Score: 1

Funny idea, but incorrect. RAID-1 is a lot more redundant than any of the higher ones, including RAID-6.

Remember, there's nothing that says RAID-1 is limited to 2 drives - I've got a 4-way mirror boot volume at home, for example.

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What a depressingly stupid machine.
Re:RAID by PiSkyHi · 2010-06-29 16:58 · Score: 1

RAID 0 has redundancy, precisely 0 redundancy.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:39 · Score: 5, Funny

Same thing I immediately thought. 3GB by itself is simply not interesting. What I'd be much MORE interested in is taking 4 of these things and putting them into my FreeNAS RAID setup (which is currently running 1GB drives).

I've had too many drive failures over the years to trust anything too valuable to a single drive.

Time for an upgrade, son. Time for an upgrade.

banal platitudes by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:39 · Score: 1, Funny

This isnt one: "That's more capacity than my entire four-drive RAID for just $250."

But this is: "Yes, it is also a single point of failure. And judging from the fact that it is a Seagate, it is one massive gaping single point of failure. Your RAID is almost certainly more reliable, unless it is a RAID-0 of Seagate drives..... Let us be careful not to forget that the initial 1 TB drives had to use 5 platters because data storage density per platter isn't at all what it is today, even now the best platters I am aware of only have 500GB per side, so we are talking a 4 platter drive (maybe less, I might be out of the loop here). The 5 platter 1TB drives were unreliable, too much heat, a total of 5 heads on the actuator arm, etc. Best bet is to wait and see how many people suffer loss with this drive before you get one, and opt for the revision 8 of the drive. Just my 2 cents."

Than you for your time, have been your run of the mill pseudopedantic total douchebag asshat selfproclaimed clerisy fucking loser on /.

People shouldn't call and wake me up this early, ever.

Re:banal platitudes by Pentium100 · 2010-06-29 05:35 · Score: 1

I have an 8 platter/15 head 5.25" drive that still works...
Re:banal platitudes by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 11:39 · Score: 0

sheesh, micropolis?
Re:banal platitudes by Pentium100 · 2010-06-30 02:55 · Score: 1

Sticker on the drive says Seagate ST41200N, the drive identifies itself as IMPRIMIS 94601-15, so it probably was manufactured around the time when Seagate bought Imprimis (they changed the sticker but did not bother to change the ROM or wherever the ID is stored).

Not interesting by line-bundle · 2010-06-29 01:39 · Score: 1

I cannot find from the site whether it is one internal 3.5 inch drive (which is news) or two (which is not news).

Quite frankly external drives are not technologically that interesting (to me).

Re:Not interesting by jonbryce · 2010-06-29 01:52 · Score: 1

From the dimensions here
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/external-hard-drive/desktop-hard-drive/?intcmp=bac-en-us-home-h_hero1-goflexdesk-3tb#tTabContentSpecifications
I don't think you could get two drives in there, but it could be a fat 3.5" drive similar to the 2.5" 1TB drives you get from various places.
Re:Not interesting by Malc · 2010-06-29 02:04 · Score: 1

Why aren't external drives interesting?
These things sound promising to me, but then I move uncompressed HD video between systems (think 6GB per minute, or double for 3D) between computers and locations.

Too noisy and too much heat waste by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:40 · Score: 0

After using a Mac mini as my main computer for the last five years, all I can say is that 3.5" drives are just too big, too noisy and generate too much heat.

I'm waiting for 2.5" drives with increased capacity. These things can be powered by the same single USB cable they use for the data.

Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by BlackSnake112 · 2010-06-29 02:29 · Score: 2, Insightful

Unless they are SATA drives. Only the ATA drives worked that way. The 2.5 inch SATA drives still require the power connection to function. Since all of these newer drives are SATA (II or III) you will still need the power connection. I have tried and the 2.5 inch drives did not spin up until I plugged in the power connection. The data connection on a SATA drive does not give power.
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by bakawolf · 2010-06-29 03:07 · Score: 1

Many 2.5" sata enclosures will run the drive off the power provided by a single USB cable. Some boards do not provide enough power for this, and require a second cable.
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by omnichad · 2010-06-29 03:29 · Score: 1

Uhh...what? The guy's talking about USB drive enclosures. Why are you bringing up eSATA? There are plenty of external SATA drives in USB enclosures that are USB bus powered.
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by compro01 · 2010-06-29 04:00 · Score: 1

What are you on about? The drives have always required a power connection. The enclosure just runs the +5V line on the USB port to the drive, which provides enough current (500mA) for most drives or you can gang 2 ports together with a double-headed cable and get up to a full amp of current, which should spin up any 2.5" drive.
Just because your enclosure doesn't do that doesn't mean it doesn't work.

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Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Caetel · 2010-06-29 04:01 · Score: 1

External SATA USB 2.5" drives can transfer data & power over a single cable, as long as enough power is supplied through a single USB port.
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:08 · Score: 0

I think poster was simply referring to the fact that most 2.5" drives work in a USB enclosure with only USB power -- though he started out talking about internal drives it seems.
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by sexconker · 2010-06-29 04:44 · Score: 1

How is this insightful?
It is simply wrong and misguided.
You're talking about 2.5" SATA drives running only off of the data cable (which is impossible, as you state).
The GP was talking about 2.5" drives running off a single USB cable.
For a SATA drive to run off of USB at all, there would need to be a controller between them. You can't power SATA drives via the SATA data connection. But you can power it via the SATA power connection. Simply take the power lines from the USB cable and pull them over to the appropriates pins in the SATA power connector.
You can easily power many 2.5" SATA drives via the 5v @ 500 mA USB provides. A decent 2.5" enclosure will have a USB hookup, an eSata hookup, and a 5V barrel jack hookup. They'll often provide you with a USB Y passthrough cable. One end plugs into the drive, the other end has two USB connectors. One goes into the PC, and if the drive works, you're done. If not, plug the other connector into another USB port for more power. The second connector is a passthrough connector, so you don't lose 2 USB ports. Low-power or self-powered devices (mice, keyboards, scanners, printers) can run off of that passthrough connection unimpeded.
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/8284/splittedcable.jpg
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 05:15 · Score: 0

Most 2.5" enclosures pull power off the usb and give it to the power connector on the actual drive. This is what he was talking about.
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Sloppy · 2010-06-29 06:24 · Score: 1

Too noisy? Take a close look at the back of your mac mini, and you're going to find something wonderful: an ethernet jack. That lets you put your server and its noisy drives as far away as you need, and frees you from the constraints of what can fit (currently -- yes I know things keep changing!) in a 2.5" bay.

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Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 07:25 · Score: 0

Server? My Mac mini is my main computer you insensitive clod!
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by DMUTPeregrine · 2010-06-29 08:39 · Score: 1

Unless it's using an e-SATAP connector. (SATA and USB power combined into one connector.)

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Not a sentence!
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 09:29 · Score: 0

Did you miss the part where it said the drive was 3.5 inch SATA?
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by cynyr · 2010-06-29 14:19 · Score: 1

Do 2.5" drives need 12V power, or just 5V? and how many amps?

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Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 15:20 · Score: 0

2.5" IDE drives had 44 pins - the extra 4 being for power.
Re:Too noisy and too much heat waste by Agripa · 2010-06-30 05:32 · Score: 1

5 volts at about 1/2 amp is typical.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:40 · Score: 2, Informative

Seagate already announced their drives would hit some limitations of the LBA standard, so -if I'm correct- their drives would only run on 64-bit windows systems using modified controllers. The enclosure probably avoids these problems.

I think I know why it's external. by GNUALMAFUERTE · 2010-06-29 01:45 · Score: 3, Interesting

Because of two reasons:

1st) It's too damn slow to run an operating system from it, so they force you to use it as a second disk, through a slow interface like USB, so you won't notice.
2nd) It doesn't work in 99% of all bioses, and it probably requires a special driver to work through USB (at least on winslow systems).

They are masquerading the issues behind USB.

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Re:I think I know why it's external. by TheThiefMaster · 2010-06-29 02:27 · Score: 1

Also it's possibly not standard height, so while technically 3.5" may not fit in a normal PC.
Re:I think I know why it's external. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 02:30 · Score: 1, Informative

It doesn't work in 100% of all bioses actually. 3TB and up can only (practically) be partitioned using GPT. Regular partition tables can only encode a length and/or offset of up to 2TB, so you would be forced to partition it in two parts, where neither can be larger than 2TB. That approach would halt at 4TB anyway, as then the offset field is just plain too small.
When you switch to GPT you don't have a boot sector (MBR) anymore; you get an EFI loader. That means that most systems would need an EFI instead of a BIOS so they wouldn't work.
They're not masquerading. They're protecting the innocent & stupid masses from a non-working device because their software is too shitty to support it.
Re:I think I know why it's external. by ShadowRangerRIT · 2010-06-29 02:38 · Score: 1

To your point 2: It won't work as a boot disk with *any* BIOS. My understanding is that no backwards compatible BIOS design would recognize disks above 2 TB in size. If you don't use the MBR disk format, you can exceed 2 TB, but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with. That's why we've had the push to switch to EFI/UEFI; they'll work with GPT (GUID Partitition Table) disks, which on top of enabling disks of near infinite (9.4 ZB) size, also adds a lot of data integrity features. Right now, if your MBR is corrupted, your disk dies, at least as far as 99% of users are concerned. GPT disks store the critical data in two locations, and CRC check the data so they can identify corruption (and use the backup data).
Also, you meant "masking" not "masquerading." Unless you really think there is a costume party out behind "USB headquarters," and disk limitations are in attendance.

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Re:I think I know why it's external. by Winckle · 2010-06-29 03:24 · Score: 1

Also, you meant "masking" not "masquerading." Unless you really think there is a costume party out behind "USB headquarters," and disk limitations are in attendance.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/masquerading
3.
false outward show; façade; pretense: a hypocrite's masquerade of virtue.
4.
activity, existence, etc., under false pretenses: a rich man's masquerade as a beggar.
Re:I think I know why it's external. by ShadowRangerRIT · 2010-06-29 03:48 · Score: 1

Yes, it can be used more generally, but I was using a specific, excessively precise definition for humor. Those more general definitions are still wrong in this instance though; USB is not a false outward show, pretense, or façade. It isn't pretending to be anything it's not. They are hiding implementation details behind a USB driver, but it's not some sort of elaborate disguise; you know exactly what you're getting. There is a distinction between hiding your flaws and disguising flaws as something else. Only the latter would count as a masquerade (take a look at your own definition; it only covers disguise, not concealment). Masking covers concealment as well as disguise, and would therefore be appropriate.
Sheesh. Can't believe I needed to explain that.

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$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Re:I think I know why it's external. by Blakey+Rat · 2010-06-29 03:50 · Score: 1

and it probably requires a special driver to work through USB (at least on winslow systems).
Why do you say that? NTFS supports drives up to 256 terabytes.

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Comment of the year
Re:I think I know why it's external. by magus_melchior · 2010-06-29 03:54 · Score: 1

... they force you to use it as a second disk, through a slow interface like USB, so you won't notice.
If that's the case, it'll also be the slowest USB3/Firewire drive on the market. Mac users and those using newer USB3 boards will probably notice.

--
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Re:I think I know why it's external. by am+2k · 2010-06-29 04:06 · Score: 1

I'm sure that 2TB also seemed "near infinite" when that standard was defined...
Re:I think I know why it's external. by ShadowRangerRIT · 2010-06-29 04:33 · Score: 1

Granted, I'm sure we'll eventually come up with situations where zettabytes are used. According to some surveys, the total amount of data stored worldwide is around 1.2 ZB, and it expected to increase by a factor of 44 over the next decade. However, that's a far cry from saying individual home users will be using zettabyte based drives. User "affordable" (<$10K) hard disks storing more than one MB were first available in 1981. It took us roughly 25 years to put out a drive with even one TB. Even if we ignore the physical limitations we're hitting with platter drives, that would still mean it would take another 25-30 years to hit exabytes, and half that again to hit zettabytes. And that assumes we come up with a home user scenario that can actually use that much data. Even at human eye resolutions, with 240 Hz and true 3D images, we'd be hard pressed to increase the cost of video storage by more than 10,000 times or so, which would only get us into the mid-TB range. A TB is to a ZB what a KB is to a TB; I'm not seeing a compelling case for ZB storage when even EB storage would hold tens of thousands of these hypothetical videos. And remember, the limit is per drive; nothing prevents you from installing two of them (well, aside from the lack of ZFS support in most major operating systems).

--
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Re:I think I know why it's external. by am+2k · 2010-06-29 04:47 · Score: 1

Well, taking your estimate, that's still in my lifetime (assuming that I don't meet an untimely demise).
Concerning usage scenarios, I can think of some. For example, I'm working on fluid simulations where you can easily generate a GB of data per second even today. Those will become pretty popular once the hardware limitations (RAM and processing power) aren't that much of a concern any more, and this technique scales up endlessly.
One additional use case would be using CT-like scans for movies. Then you could watch it in any angle you'd like. That's also a huge dataset.
Re:I think I know why it's external. by Pentium100 · 2010-06-29 05:45 · Score: 1

...but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with
But all the BIOS does is read LBA #0 of a drive looking for the 55AA signature, if found, load the sector to memory and jump to it. From then the program that actually is in the MBR can do whatever it wants.
Drive makers used to provide various drive overlays that enabled various drives to work in systems that did not support the capacity (at least one such overlay was used in >137GB drives on systems that did not support LBA48). Can't they make such an overlay now?
Re:I think I know why it's external. by Bengie · 2010-06-29 05:47 · Score: 1

4.8gb/sec USB3 isn't all that slow.
#2 is a good possible reason though.
Re:I think I know why it's external. by IrquiM · 2010-06-29 06:17 · Score: 1

Operating systems are run from the SSD - this is just the /home drive!

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This is blinging
Re:I think I know why it's external. by evilviper · 2010-06-29 08:01 · Score: 2, Informative

My understanding is that no backwards compatible BIOS design would recognize disks above 2 TB in size. If you don't use the MBR disk format, you can exceed 2 TB, but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with.
The BIOS doesn't need to "work with" a hard drive, unless you're running a legacy OS (DOS, Windows 95, etc) on it. Any GPT-enabled version of GRUB / LILO / etc. will allow a BIOS-based system to boot-up a Linux (or FreeBSD, or ...) kernel on drives of any size. The BIOS only needs to recognize the first few sectors, so it can read the instructions on the header of the disk.
Windows, OTOH, will not work, as Microsoft refuses to handle the boot-strapping process without firmware support, and so demands the use EFI for GPT partitions.

It won't work as a boot disk with *any* BIOS.
This is just pedantry. It's perfectly understandable people will call EFI their "BIOS", even though it is technically a different type of firmware.

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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Re:I think I know why it's external. by Steve+Baker · 2010-06-29 08:03 · Score: 1

I doubt it's too slow, in fact it's likely very fast, and the BIOS issue is no doubt very real, but hardly the first time it's been an issue (and hardly unforseen by BIOS makers). It may be the case that the firmware might not be up to speed with respect to things like TCQ and the like (which seagate has had major issues with in the recent past). So in an effort to get this thing to market as quickly as possible, they could be papering over those problems with USB allright as their external controller can just dance around any problems in the drives firmware. I'd just note that external SATA is _not_ an option, although that proves nothing.
I would advise some caution if attempting to use this drive internally.
Re:I think I know why it's external. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 08:14 · Score: 0

Too slow? What the hell you are talking about? The OS is just few megabytes by it size! And bootloader loads it to RAM in the beginning. The whole OS is running always from RAM and not from harddrive!
Do not mistake operating system (aka Monolithic kernels or server-client architectured OS's like microkernel+modules(servers)) and software system to same thing! OS (like Linux kernel, NT, XNU, HURD, Minix, FreeBSD, SunOS etc) is always running in RAM and does not be effected by slow HD in normal use (only when you need to load new modules (servers) the long term storage device (in this case the harddrive) need to be readed and reading few kilobytes does not take long!
Re:I think I know why it's external. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 16:19 · Score: 1, Interesting

Thank you - came to post this.
Here's a cut and paste of an email I sent about 8 months ago about this issue.
Some of the information has changed (about fedora and RHEL6), and obviously the fact that "no one manufactures a drive larger than 2TiB".
Note: I was pretty careful to use TB and TiB when I meant TB and TiB; and to use physical / logical when I meant physical or logical, and to use partition / filesystem when I meant filesystem. Words mean things, and understanding why "the 2TB problem" is a problem is not difficult but it involves reading and understanding the concepts.
Feel free to copy pasta this if you need it.

WHY IT DOES NOT WORK:
Master Boot Record limitation.
It's nothing to do with partition sizes or file systems or partition
types or ext3.
ANY system that uses an MBR (i.e. ALL RHEL, including Fedora 12, which
is what RH6 is supposedly based on) will NOT boot off of a logical disk
of 2TiB or more. I'm sure that goes for physical disks as well, but
currently, no one makes a 2TiB disk (the 2TB disks out there for
consumer use are slightly smaller than 2TiB).
The reason for this is that the MBR contains the logical block
addressing information for the logical disk on which it resides, and
this is stored in a 32 bit integer. ANY computer that uses a logical
disk that is >2TiB cannot use an MBR to boot* from that logical disk,
because the MBR cannot address the whole disk. (*without a crowbar)
So, before any information about the formatting or filesystem or any of
that stuff is loaded, you turn the computer on, the bios takes over, and
then seeks the MBR to go to the next boot step.
WHAT WE'VE TRIED:
Certain raid levels can create a logical disk of arbitrary size;
however, raid1 and raid10 cannot create logical disks except along
physical disk geometry. This was tried with PERC 6's. Raid5 will allow
for logical disk sizes along arbitrary boundaries, IIRC.
You may be able to use sfdisk to manually designate a partition table of
a size which would truncate your usable space below 2TiB of logical
disk, and sacrifice the end of the logical disk. But we couldn't get it
to work.
WHAT WILL WORK:
If you're going to *boot* off of a disk that is >2TiB, you *MUST* use GPT.
There's an overview of GPT here:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gpt/index.html
Basically, it's an MBR replacement that is fully backwards compatible.
It does NOT require EFI bios, although it was developed to work in
conjunction with it.
GPT, however, means using GRUB2. Redhat 5.x does NOT support grub2 (and
thus, neither does current Anaconda). Redhat 6.x likely will not
support grub2 by default, although Fedora 12 has grub2 in its repository
with the standard **THIS IS NOT STABLE USE AT OWN RISK** disclaimers.
Alternatively, you can move the MBR to a smaller logical disk. It would
be easy to have another disk in the system that's of insignificant size,
and put /boot and the MBR onto that disk, and have the (rest of the) OS
on a logical disk that is multiple TiB. Finding a filesystem that
supports these giant sizes is less easy - ext3 could only do it with
bigger blocks - but systems such as reiser or XFS should be able to
handle it.
So, in order to do this, there are basically 3 options:
1.) Hack anaconda to use grub2 and parted instead of fdisk.
2.) move the MBR anywhere else - a 128mb USB key would work
3.) (*this is the crowbar) - hex edit the MBR to stop at the 32 bit
boundary and forego the space at the end of the drive above 1.999999 TiB.
Anyway, just wanted to make sure that everyone had the benefit of our
efforts. Most of you probably already knew this, but some might not have.
Re:I think I know why it's external. by complete+loony · 2010-06-29 19:57 · Score: 1

The biggest reason why windows wont work is the new 4k sector problem. XP assumes a disk sector size of 512 bytes and may align it's 4k data pages incorrectly. This forces the disk firmware to read 2 sectors for any read / write request.

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09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.

Bigger isn't better. by elucido · 2010-06-29 01:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

At this point we need faster more secure storage, not bigger. A solid state drive with optional encryption would be far more impressive than a 3 TB drive. What are we supposed to use a 3TB drive for? The internet isn't fast enough for most of us to fill it up. When we all have FIOS it might be a different story. And even then it will be too slow.

Re:Bigger isn't better. by King_TJ · 2010-06-29 01:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

Actually, I think we need *both* bigger AND faster, more secure storage. This only addresses one of the issues, mind you - but it has some definite uses.
Off-hand, I wouldn't mind owning one of these as a "Time Machine" backup drive for my Mac Pro tower, for example. When I start working with video editing and try to keep around a library of clips I might want to re-use, plus having my entire iTunes music library and photo collection stored on it, I reach a point where a 3TB external backup drive would be nice. Not saying I'd have 3TB of data to back up ... but it allows keeping enough changed data over time so you can go back further in the past to retrieve older (now deleted) files you realize you want back.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by espiesp · 2010-06-29 01:58 · Score: 1

Believe it or not, the internet is not the only source of data in the world.
Start ripping DVDs or especially Blueray movies and you'll eat up capacity 'very' quickly.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by ErikZ · 2010-06-29 02:03 · Score: 1

Really? I'm already using up 1.5 TB of data across 3 drives. No backup.
Get two of these, mirror them, and I get more space and a backup system.
Plus, if the data density has increased, they'll transfer data faster too.

--
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Yvan256 · 2010-06-29 02:06 · Score: 1, Flamebait

I'm sorry that you have a slow internet connection, but for the rest of us it's pretty easy to fill up three terabytes with photos, music and movies.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by CustomCaseGuy · 2010-06-29 02:29 · Score: 1

I agree. Plus we have all the space we need on the web.

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From http://www.south-pak.com
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Maltheus · 2010-06-29 02:39 · Score: 2, Interesting

For you maybe. For me, disk space is and has always been the one thing that can't keep up. I don't ever need to max my ram, cpu, or gpu. But until they make a quantum leap in disk capacity (like 100 TB), I'll always been on the verge of being overwhelmed by data accumulation (mostly video).
Re:Bigger isn't better. by 0100010001010011 · 2010-06-29 02:40 · Score: 2, Insightful

DVCPRO HD is 40 to 100Mbit/s.
A 2 hour movie would be up to ~90GB. Say you shoot video for a living, you could easily take 10 hours of video a week.
So you're up to ~1TB for a week of video. Plus scratch disk, plus some extra clips. 3TB starts to get filled very quickly.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by mlts · 2010-06-29 02:50 · Score: 1

I'd like to see as part of the ATA spec encryption on the drive. Not just AES-256, but another algorithm like Serpent just in case AES has a weakness and gets depreciated. All SATA hard disks have the ability to set a drive password, so we should have it as part of the drive standard. Keys can be managed in a number of ways, either via a BIOS password, multiple keys (in case of enterprise recovery needs), or via a smart card/TPM chip. The upside of this method is that the encryption would then be not handled by the OS. This means Linux, Windows, BeOS, or anything on the machine would be secured regardless.
For external drives, ideally it would be nice to have a panel on the external enclosure for typing in one's PIN/passphrase. This way, should a computer be compromised and passwords obtained via a keylogger, the drive can still be secure. Or for even more security, have a USB port for smart cards. Fingerprint scanners are nice theater, but fingerprints are for usernames, not passwords. In combination with a PIN (with a system that erases the data after too many attempts) or passphrase, a fingerprint would provide decent security, but not just by itself.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by gr8_phk · 2010-06-29 02:56 · Score: 1

I didn't know you could rip bluray movies !?!? Has the system been broken already?
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 02:58 · Score: 0

The internet isn't fast enough for most of us to fill it up
Try taking photos saving your images as RAW (.CR2) with an 18MP dSLR that also shoots HD video, and you'll soon find out that you need lots of storage. Also, speed doesn't matter for archiving.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by b0bby · 2010-06-29 03:38 · Score: 1

Not only has it been broken, but you can even set up Media Center with auto ripping tools so that you can do it from your couch with a remote...
Re:Bigger isn't better. by ColdWetDog · 2010-06-29 04:01 · Score: 1

What are we supposed to use a 3TB drive for? The internet isn't fast enough for most of us to fill it up.
Look, just because your low testosterone porn collection fits on your USB keychain fob, don't for a minute think that the rest of us feel the need to be so constrained.

There are more pictures on the Internet, elucido, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.....

--
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:08 · Score: 0

I have 15/1 service and download around 1TB per month. I don't leave my computer on at night, don't max my connection all day, and consider myself a moderate user.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by thesandtiger · 2010-06-29 04:46 · Score: 1

What "we" need is going to vary depending on who you talk to.
At home I've got over 40TB worth of stuff - rips of movies (DVD and then BluRay) I own, entire television series' runs, hundreds of games, thousands of apps, god only knows how many animations & movies I've made as a hobbyist, and about 100k ebooks in various formats, along with tons of documents (everything I've ever written in a digital format, which covers schooling for 4 degrees, journals, blogs, work papers, etc.) and every website I've ever created. Toss in family movies and photos, recordings of my parents' memoirs, photos of various documents... And music... oy.... Crap you download off the internet is hardly the only thing a person is going to want to be able to archive.
All of my movies, music, games and software are on live storage, everything else is archived. I'd love to have it all be live accessible. I'm probably at the outside edge of personal use, though.
But my point is - quantity has a quality all its own, and while more reliable (yes, please) drives would be great, honkin' big ones at a pretty cheap price is nothing to sneer at.

--
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:47 · Score: 0

My home fileserver (3x1tb) has 20 gigabytes left as of this morning. Speak for yourself. I definitely need more storage.
Security doesn't matter as much as this is mostly archival storage that also exists on other machines.
Faster also doesn't matter, as long as it has enough throughput to pull a 1080p movie in real time- latency especially doesn't matter, a second or two delay between hitting play and it playing does not matter
The internet is plenty fast to fill this up. Comcast offers 50mbit down, and soon will be doing 100mbit down. Thats.. 3.9 days of straight downloading to fill it. More likely about a year of just time shifting new tv shows as they air. Thats just cable in the US. They also sell these world wide, where 100mbit is the standard and gigabit is an option.
Thats assuming you fill it from the internet with tv shows. Theres no reason you need to fill this with content from the internet. How about keeping all your RAW pictures from your dslr? Raw clips from your hidef camera and the various states of editing? 24/7 recordings off security cams? (at which point the larger your disks, the less times you need to swap disks and the less it costs to manage the system)
There are plenty of use cases for magnetic storage. Not everyone is you.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by elucido · 2010-06-29 04:49 · Score: 1

What are we supposed to use a 3TB drive for? The internet isn't fast enough for most of us to fill it up.
Look, just because your low testosterone porn collection fits on your USB keychain fob, don't for a minute think that the rest of us feel the need to be so constrained.
There are more pictures on the Internet, elucido, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.....
Why not save your porn on the cloud? Why save it on your harddrive? That seems like the dumb place to store it if you have better options.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 05:03 · Score: 0

Speak for yourself, my internet is fast enough to fill a 3 TB drive in a few days... Oh, wait, you must be from the US, the land of the slow internet :)
Re:Bigger isn't better. by ceoyoyo · 2010-06-29 05:30 · Score: 1

I just filled up a 1.5 T, so yeah, I need space. And I really don't want it encrypted. So no, your particular desires are not representative of everyone.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 05:33 · Score: 0

All jokes about pr0n aside, I would LOVE to rip all my DVDs and Blu-rays onto a HTPC and serve content from there. But with most Blus weighing in at 40GB, 3TB ain't going to cut it for my collection.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by spire3661 · 2010-06-29 05:50 · Score: 1

Am i like the ONLY techie in the world that doesnt feel the need to accumulate pron? Ive been holding digital archives for a decade now and its still just photos(originals by me), documents, and music.

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Good-bye
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Pentium100 · 2010-06-29 05:50 · Score: 1

Or you can use Truecrypt or similar and the rest of us can pay less for the drives.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by evilviper · 2010-06-29 07:51 · Score: 1

At this point we need faster more secure storage, not bigger.
Faster would be nice, but RAID helps tremendously there...
But I certainly wouldn't trade large amounts capacity for speed, and neither would the rest of the world, which is why we don't all use SSDs.
Between a couple of my PCs and a HD DVR, I can certainly fill-up a 3TB drive in a relatively short time-frame. I know this, because I have to keep cleaning-up my 1.5TB drive I use for backup copies.
I will say that some more effort should go into lowering the price floor. Far too often people that don't need much space will buy a 1TB drive because it's only $15 more than a similar 100GB drive. So lower-cost drives for budget computers would be desirable, and low-end Flash isn't cheap enough in reasonable capacities, either.

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Re:Bigger isn't better. by mister_playboy · 2010-06-29 11:57 · Score: 1

But until they make a quantum leap in disk capacity (like 100 TB), I'll always been on the verge of being overwhelmed by pr0n accumulation (mostly video).
FTFY. :)

--
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
Re:Bigger isn't better. by turkeyfish · 2010-06-29 12:49 · Score: 1

I'll second that. My Nikon D90 puts out files about 10MB in size every time I press the button and 4-8GB per SD chip. It definitely doesn't take long for these to start adding up in a hurry and then, of course, there is the need to back these up, so at a minimum 2X.
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 12:58 · Score: 0

I disagree. My 10TB NAS could definitely benefit from an occasional mirror to a few of these drives. Maybe when they are down to 200 bucks...
Re:Bigger isn't better. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-30 04:40 · Score: 0

In my cable 6 MB Internet home connection, I dowload around 1TB every year, and I only have it on when I'm at home and not sleeping, which is not more than 6 hours a day. I usually don't go much faster than 100KB/s, so I could download 6 times as much if I were to download the most seeded torrents, rapidshare... Some people collect HD movies, around 8 GB each, 1TB = 125 movies, which is not so much if you are a big movie collector, and you can dowload 1 or 2 of these every day.
So I think yes, a 3TB disk can be filled up very fast. You could fill it even with a good 3G connection.
Also, there are a lot of not home users with special storage needs: video creation, science, 3D... All of them can fill GB of data every day

RPM? by jamesh · 2010-06-29 01:47 · Score: 1

It's not a 5400RPM 'LP' drive is it? That would suck. The press release doesn't seem to say...

Re:RPM? by Yvan256 · 2010-06-29 02:54 · Score: 1

I thought LP was only 33.3 RPM?
Re:RPM? by b0bby · 2010-06-29 03:40 · Score: 1

I actually like the slower, cool running drives for larger storage - they don't overheat your cabinet if you're using them for DVR stuff, plus they're quieter. Sucks as a system drive, yes, but not for everything.

Still not very useful. by elucido · 2010-06-29 01:48 · Score: 0

If you download 3 TB of movies from bit torrent you'd be a fool to store it on that drive.
On top of all that it's not solid state. Why do they even make drives which aren't solid state?

A solid state drive which is 200 gigs would be far superior to the 3TB drive for external storage because of it's speed.

Re:Still not very useful. by vegiVamp · 2010-06-29 02:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

Except for, you know, raw capacity. Oh, and price.

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What a depressingly stupid machine.
Re:Still not very useful. by elucido · 2010-06-29 02:06 · Score: 1

Except for, you know, raw capacity. Oh, and price.
The only thing I can think of would be if you are an artist who makes movies, or if you run a business but even then you'd probably invest in something better than this.
Re:Still not very useful. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 02:18 · Score: 0

What? He works for the movie industry because he points out two areas in which solid state drives are not superior? Everyone does not choose their drives based solely on speed, just because you do.
Re:Still not very useful. by drinkypoo · 2010-06-29 02:30 · Score: 1

The only thing I can think of would be if you are an artist who makes movies, or if you run a business but even then you'd probably invest in something better than this.
A disk like this would be a nice DVR storage volume. Nothing on there is so important you can't lose it. I run hd-idle against some WD MyBooks and it works fine, they just spin down when I'm not accessing them. I'm waiting for my FreeAgent Dockstar to arrive, and I will attach my MyBooks to it... well, as soon as I get some GigE to go with it. That way I can shut down my primary desktop and still play my format- and/or time-shifted media from the PC hooked up to the TV.

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:Still not very useful. by Wovel · 2010-06-29 02:32 · Score: 1

There are literally thousands of use cases where a 3TB drive is a far superior choice to 200gig SSD. If they were in the same universe from a cost perspective it might make some sense to use SSD. While not this consumer model disk, businesses still rely far more on large capacity HDDs than SSDs. The biggest use of SSD in business today is probably caching.
Just because something is newer and even faster does not make it the best choice.
Re:Still not very useful. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 02:58 · Score: 0

If you download 3 TB of movies from bit torrent you'd be a fool to store it on that drive.
On top of all that it's not solid state. Why do they even make drives which aren't solid state?
A solid state drive which is 200 gigs would be far superior to the 3TB drive for external storage because of it's speed.
Wait, what? Let me see if I've got this straight. Cheap, large drives are bad for movies but a 200GB SSD would be a good replacement?
A 200GB SSD would only be a replacement to this drive in the sense that a Ferrari 458 would be a replacement to a UPS truck.
Here's a hint; movie and media streaming doesn't need blistering speed and small space. In fact, if anything, it needs the exact opposite.
Re:Still not very useful. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 03:47 · Score: 0

Because rotating media is still so much more cost effective.
Sure a 0.2TB SSD might be a ton faster, but it is still 15 times smaller than the 3TB HDD.
Plus if you are using the external for back-up (common use case) the speed is a mute point as usually you back-up while not actually using the computer.
Re:Still not very useful. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:16 · Score: 0

You don't have very much imagination.
Re:Still not very useful. by Pentium100 · 2010-06-29 05:29 · Score: 1

Of course, with my current hard drive I can only watch something like 40 movies at once. There are some times that I wish I could watch at least 100 movies at once. OTOH, I have 10 hard drives, so I would be able to watch more movies at once, but my file server only has a 1gbps ethernet connection and only PCI 32bit/33MHz slots, so a 10gbps network card would be useless. Also, for external drives, USB2.0 limits the transfer speed to ~40MB/s which a hard drive can do.
Oh and my internet connection will be upgraded to FTTH, but that will only be 200mbps, at least for now, so a hard drive will be enough for seeding.
I use LTO2 tapes for archiving, but my tape drive can read or write at only 30MB/s so a hard drive is enough there too.
Re:Still not very useful. by DrVxD · 2010-06-29 08:50 · Score: 1

Think harder - one obvious application for a drive like this is as a (relatively) inexpensive online backup for a home NAS.

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Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

eSATA? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:53 · Score: 0

It's got Firewire (why?) but no eSATA? Come on.

NTFS? by Yvan256 · 2010-06-29 01:57 · Score: 2, Funny

Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac.

We use HFS Plus, you insensitive clods!

Rate of Growth Slowing by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 01:57 · Score: 1, Interesting

Back in 2007 and 2008 we Fujitsu and Hitachi both claimed we'd have 5TB hard disks by 2010

http://www.reghardware.com/2008/07/04/hitachi_5tb_hdd_2010/

Clearly they're falling well short of their goal. Thinking back I remember having the following hard disks at the following times:

1996 - 540MB
1999 - 8GB
2002 - 300GB

Back then we were seeing a growth of capacity that's an order of magnitude larger than we're seeing today. This isn't entirely accurate since I recall when I bought the 300GB drive it was the largest you could get, but when I got the 540MB drive 1.2GB drives were available (don't remember what the biggest was in 1998). However it still comes down to about 2x growth every three years now versus 20x growth every three years then.

Personally I think in these days of 24Mbit/sec HD video cameras and media servers we need capacity now more than ever (especially considering you need to buy twice your required capacity to backup). Sadly it's taking a painfully long time just to get internal 3TB drives out, forget the 5TB drives we were promised a few years ago.

Perhaps they just want to sell us multiple drives instead of one larger drive, thus keeping their profits up?

Re:Rate of Growth Slowing by grimJester · 2010-06-29 02:30 · Score: 1

I've been thinking the same thing for a while. 1,5TB drives have been the cheapest per TB for a fairly long time now. I wonder if Moore's law for hd capacity is starting to break?
Re:Rate of Growth Slowing by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 03:29 · Score: 0

Growth of HDD capacity is definitely slowing. By now, I'd expect 4-5TB drives out and 2-3TB in the average machine that you find at Wally World. However, another issue is the speed of I/O. USB 2 is still the standard for external drives, 10 years later. eSATA, iSCSI [1], or FCoE should be what machines use these days for external drives.
[1]: iSCSI is more efficient than FCoE, assuming jumbo frames are enabled -- http://tinyurl.com/yjm72hk. Of course, this doesn't factor in other stuff, but it would be nice if more machines had 2-3 10Gbps Ethernet NICs for iSCSI. Ethernet interfaces are inexpensive, so having more than one on a machine wouldn't break the bank.
Re:Rate of Growth Slowing by Lennie · 2010-06-29 03:31 · Score: 1

Don't know, I'm pretty happy with what I have right now, I'm just happy Moore's law works for SSD.

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New things are always on the horizon

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 02:01 · Score: 0

My thoughts exactly.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by LordKronos · 2010-06-29 02:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

I don't get it. Why are the standards for hard drives always way too late to appear? I can't count the number of times over the years when new hard drives would come out and even relatively new machines needed hacks to work with the full capacity. It seems like every time they extend a standard they only plan a few years out and we've got to go through this process over and over again.

Look at the price. by elucido · 2010-06-29 02:03 · Score: 2, Insightful

http://www.everythingusb.com/seagate-freeagent-xtreme-1.5tb-external-hard-drive-15790.html

This product seems to be "better" but it's also over $500. Thats certainly out of my price range and probably out of the price range for the majority. On the other hand it supports 128bit AES encryption. It supports HARDWARE encryption and you don't have to write down any passwords. I'd say it's a great external drive but once again $500+ for a 1.5TB drive?

Bigger drives have their purposes but overtime the bigger the drive the harder it is to organize all the data. If you know how to use regular expressions and desktop search you can solve the organization problem but then you end up with the problem of how to secure the data. You can encrypt the data with a password but to be secure it probably has to be written down which defeats the purpose. And none of these drives seem to be solid state drives. This means backing up files is usually slow as hell.

It's very useful to have 3TB backup. I'd say any serious user would need something like this, but it's better to go with speed and security for the price if you have to make a choice.

Re:Look at the price. by Wovel · 2010-06-29 02:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

As the person you responded to already mentioned, it would be good for time machine backups. With time machine backups:
1. Organization is not an issue
2. Speed is a very, very, very negligible issue
3. Any data needing encryption should be encrypted at the source, again not an issue
4. Larger capacity means increased granularity and the ability to backup more machines
5. Why would I spend twice as much money for half the capacity and encryption I don't need?
The same could be said for any windows (or any other) backup solution. There are countless situations where speed and security are less important than Raw capacity. I have more than 2 terabytes of movies, tv shows and music on disk. (4x1 TB Raid 5). I would certainly consider 3TB drives (if they actually exist) in the future long before SSD, or a smaller, more expensive drive with encryption..
Re:Look at the price. by spire3661 · 2010-06-29 05:43 · Score: 1

How do you have the RAID 5 backed up?

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Good-bye
Re:Look at the price. by dogganos · 2010-06-29 07:35 · Score: 1

I wouldn't trust ANY product with hardware encryption. It has been SO many times that we 've heard those poor encryption implementations to fail miserably out of incompetence, or malevolence (backdoors etc)...

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 02:08 · Score: 1, Informative

It's even worse than that. Boot records have a max at 2.1 TB or something IIRC, and so you pretty much need to drop BIOS in order to use it fully. Unless you've got an UEFI motherboard from somewhere, in which case I imagine that you could pry it out and get it to work.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by BlackSnake112 · 2010-06-29 02:16 · Score: 1

Wasn't there an announcement by Intel or someone that they are dropping BIOS not too long ago?

USB2? by prattle · 2010-06-29 02:22 · Score: 1

A 3TB USB2 drive is like sticking a slim straw into a McDonald's milkshake.

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"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" -- Kurt Vonnegut

Re:USB2? by Wovel · 2010-06-29 02:49 · Score: 1

If your USB2 link were running at 70% of rated capacity (~280mb/s) it would take just shy of 24hours of continuous data to fill it. USB2 is more than sufficient for most home backup applications, media storage, etc...
Only in the event of a migration would you try to move it all at once. I would rather see an eSata or even FW800 interface. But, it is still a useful device and the price is right.

Seagate ? No, Thanks ! by eulernet · 2010-06-29 02:24 · Score: 1

Last December, I lost my 320Gb full of data due to their infamous click bug: when you power on the drive, it does a lot of clicking noises, and is very slow.
They released a patch which never solved my problem.

In fact, I lost 3 Seagates last year, so I cannot trust them anymore to store any of my data.

This one looks pretty expensive.
Seagate's heat dissipation is not very good, and also you cannot power down the drive when connected on a TV.

Re:Seagate ? No, Thanks ! by Maltheus · 2010-06-29 02:44 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yeah, I had some Seagate drives with a firmware problem and they wouldn't make the patched firmware available to the general public. You had to request it. Well I requested it and they never even responded. I used to be a Seagate-only kind of guy, but that debacle turned me away from the company forever and I buy at least 4-6 high capacity drives a year. I'll wait for one of the other companies to put these out.
Re:Seagate ? No, Thanks ! by FromageTheDog · 2010-06-29 04:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

Same here. Two of the 7200.11 drives (with updated firmware) died on me in the last year, and one of the RMA replacements also died soon after deployment (I know, I know, never use refurbs in a NAS; I learnt my lesson the hard way). So that's three for me too. I'd love to say "screw Seagate! Never again!" except that I'm hard pressed to find any manufacturer with a known "good" model -- they all seem to have issues. Don't even get me started on WDC. Seagate was the one go-to brand, and at this point I really don't trust them anymore. I guess it's time to stop cheaping out and getting enterprise class drives for NAS use...
Re:Seagate ? No, Thanks ! by eulernet · 2010-06-29 05:25 · Score: 1

I bought a 1Tb Samsung, they are very good.
My next buy will be the 1.5Tb (5400 RPM), for external storage.
Re:Seagate ? No, Thanks ! by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 06:47 · Score: 0

Forever? I predict you won't be buying HD's from any company a few years from now.
Re:Seagate ? No, Thanks ! by cynyr · 2010-06-29 14:21 · Score: 1

WD's RE drives are nothing more than the normal drives with a different timing oh how long they take to respond on a bad block.

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All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.

Bigger Drives by helix2301 · 2010-06-29 02:27 · Score: 2, Funny

This is really cool. This will be great for backup solutions. Since this is USB 2.0/3 this will be really fast. I can't wait to test one of these out.

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http://www.thetechnologygeek.org

Re:Bigger Drives by noidentity · 2010-06-29 11:44 · Score: 1

This will be great for backup solutions. Since this is USB 2.0/3 this will be really fast. I can't wait to test one of these out.

That's the great thing: it'll take you so long just to fill it up, even if doing it constantly, that it'll fail due to age before you are able to do so.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Lunix+Nutcase · 2010-06-29 02:30 · Score: 1

What you are thinking of was that MSI is planning a big shift to UEFI at the end of this year. Here is the story with the hugely misleading title.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2010-06-29 02:37 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by necro81 · 2010-06-29 02:40 · Score: 1

Unless you are trying to use this as a boot (or bootable) drive, you may not have a problem with a reasonably recent system. As far as the BIOS needs to be concerned with, it's just a USB-attached mass storage device. Let the OS worry about the size of the volume and the file system.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2010-06-29 02:40 · Score: 2, Informative

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Quick chat with Seagate Tech Support: by DWMorse · 2010-06-29 02:51 · Score: 4, Informative

I chatted with Bryan W. with Seagate Support this morning.

My first thought was, hmm, did they do this sly and slip two 1.5TB drives in as raid 0? But, no, they didn't. It IS actually just one 3.5" 3TB SATA drive.

The distributed technical support documentation didn't have the cache or RPM, but the representative was leaning towards the RPM being 7200.

I even went so far as to ask about it working if removed from the enclosure. Since it meets SATA standards, he believed it would work without hindrance. The wording was "it's an internal drive in an enclosure."

So, very hopeful. My guess is we're seeing the External solution released first, and in the next coming weeks we'll see the internal version with more specs up here soon.

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There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?

Re:Quick chat with Seagate Tech Support: by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:51 · Score: 0

My guess is the drive is formatted to have 4096-byte *logical* sectors, unlike existing advanced format drives which while using 4096-byte physical sectors, emulate 512-byte sectors for the host. Using larger sectors gets around the MBR 2TB limitation with 512-byte sectors. There is also no misalignment problem.
If that's the case, just taking the drive out of its case and putting it in a PC might have issues, in particular not being able to boot from it and/or the BIOS not recognising it or otherwise failing.
Linux, grub, parted etc. devs: buy one of these drives and put it in your PC so you can fix things to work properly with 4KB-sector drives!
Re:Quick chat with Seagate Tech Support: by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 14:45 · Score: 0

So they only want to sell the external for a while? Most only want the internal 3TB bare drive, spinning at a minimum of 7200, with a decent cache.
Re:Quick chat with Seagate Tech Support: by yuhong · 2010-06-29 21:14 · Score: 1

I think they are releasing it as external first exactly because of the technical issues with the 2TB barrier.
Re:Quick chat with Seagate Tech Support: by 0111+1110 · 2010-06-30 03:06 · Score: 1

The distributed technical support documentation didn't have the cache or RPM, but the representative was leaning towards the RPM being 7200.
Maybe the Seagate rep was right. When was the last time a new drive was released with no press leaks , no review samples, no prior notice at all? Just boom. Here's the drive. It's up for sale (back order now) on our web site. It sets new records for areal density with 750 gig platters. Was their marketing department all fired recently or something? I guess they wanted to beat Western Digital to 3TB. I can't wait to see the first reviews from people cracking open their external cases and installing these inside their computers.

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Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.

DVR with an antenna by gr8_phk · 2010-06-29 02:54 · Score: 1

HD signals over the air are about 9GB per hour. If you strip them down to one subchannel and then transcode to something more efficient you'll be looking at 1GB per hour. But if you're lazy and go raw things fill up fast.

ehh, plain backup is enough by phr1 · 2010-06-29 02:57 · Score: 1

RAID isn't really necessary for an application like that. RAID means when you change something on the drive, you update another drive simultaneously, in real time. For your bit torrent example it's enough to just use ordinary backups, which just means rsync'ing one drive to another every so often (nightly or whatever). That is fairly fast since it only copies the new or updated files, keeping the drives in sync. That may even help reliability, since the second drive isn't spinning except when you do a backup.

NO E-SATA or E-net? by Joe+The+Dragon · 2010-06-29 03:06 · Score: 1

NO E-SATA or E-net?

come on NO E-sata?

Re:NO E-SATA or E-net? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 03:57 · Score: 0

wtf is e-net?
Re:NO E-SATA or E-net? by spire3661 · 2010-06-29 05:46 · Score: 1

IM sure he is referring to ethernet. e-sata is also still pretty fringe and not necessary for most people IN THIS CONTEXT.

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Good-bye
Re:NO E-SATA or E-net? by turkeyfish · 2010-06-29 12:59 · Score: 1

E-SATA is a definite improvement. I have a 7200 E-SATA 1T drive that I use as my alternate notebook when working at my desk. Its too big to carry in the field (about the size of a real brick or 2 if you also have a RAID version as I also do). I'm forced to have an external power supply, with both but the interface is what makes all the difference in the world., though sadly I couldn't find a notebook on the market with 2 e-SATA ports.
Anyone know of if a E-SATA SSD drive say about 100-300 MB is available that can take power from a USB port (or if possible? the e-SATA port itself)? That would make a good alternative boot drive and/or working drive, say for editing multimedia files?

Seagate ? Maxtor ? by Lennie · 2010-06-29 03:29 · Score: 1

Seagate ? So this is actually a Maxtor, judging by it's size and market segment ? I've been disappointed by Maxtor a few times to many to not buy this.

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New things are always on the horizon

Re:Seagate ? Maxtor ? by toddestan · 2010-06-29 14:15 · Score: 1

Maxtor still around? I thought Seagate bought them out, then quietly phased out the brand.
Re:Seagate ? Maxtor ? by Lennie · 2010-06-30 02:33 · Score: 1

Yes, but what series are these Seagate's ? Derived from the old Maxtor series ?

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New things are always on the horizon

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by tedgyz · 2010-06-29 03:34 · Score: 1

I was thinking the exact same thing. The drive industry needs to give us low-cost, parallel disk solutions just like the chipmakers gave us pervasive, multi-core platforms. At the risk of sounding old, I remember when it was cool (and expensive) to own a multi-cpu system.

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"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by theRiallatar · 2010-06-29 03:41 · Score: 1

What's it matter?

The current trend appears to be 64-bit only computing - most of HP's stock either comes 64 bit or has options for 64 bit clearly marked on the restore CD's. Give it to Windows 8 and I'm sure we'll see them drop 32-bit support in favor of some solid 64-bit integration.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by ZorbaTHut · 2010-06-29 03:48 · Score: 1

As I understand it, the modern drives work fine on everything post-XP. We just have this weird ten-year gap in operating systems where Microsoft fucked up on releasing an update.

--
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Lennie · 2010-06-29 03:49 · Score: 1

Maybe it has 4k sectors like the WD EARS-series and they don't want people to use it as a boot-drive and as it's external it won't matter as much if it's slower or something, I don't know !

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New things are always on the horizon

Cost Per GB, but other considerations may apply by turkeyfish · 2010-06-29 03:59 · Score: 1

A fair point, but there are other issues to consider here.

Many laptops only have a couple of USB ports, so you can only (easily) attach a couple of devices. If you have large storage requirements, this is a step in the right direction and at a reasonable price point. In my line of work I require lots of space to store digital images about 10MB each. This quickly uses space as another 10MB is just a click of a camera away. However, I must travel and be self-contained so the total size of the drive I can carry with me is of importance, not only in terms of storage size, but of physical form factor size as well (everyone knows how difficult it is to travel with luggage these days).

A point not made clear in the article, nor as far as I can see here. What about the power supply. Does this thing require an external power supply or can it draw its power requirements from the USB port itself. I don't know why the Seagate ad doesn't make this more clear. Many larger, older form factor drives require an external power supply. This can be a no go for those who must travel internationally, since there are surprisingly large number of voltages and pin configurations for external power. Having to carry a power supply that is as large or larger than the drive itself is self-defeating and makes many of my older, larger form factor drives less useful to me.

I have a couple of Seagate 1T drives that do not require an external power supply, which makes them just great for my needs, as I can subdivide my files, taking only parts of my image library I need with me. I presume the new drive is similarly powered through the USB port, but does anyone know this for sure?

Also, the boot issue is of relevance, if one likes, as I do to also run Linux at times. Anyone know if or how this device can overcome MBR constraints to allow a portable "dual boot" configuration for this thing. I'd phase out my relatively new 1TB drives for this if this could be done.

Another consideration is MTBF. Anyone know what this is on this particular drive. My experience is that as good as SeaGate is, Toshiba drives seem to be slightly better precisioned to have longer MTBF.

Input on any of these points, by others would be appreciated.

Re:Cost Per GB, but other considerations may apply by billybacs · 2010-06-29 06:08 · Score: 0

Given the form factor, it probably requires an external power supply. Typically the ones that don't are tiny. Many of the 1TB drives I've seen without power supplies are about the size of laptop hard drives.
Re:Cost Per GB, but other considerations may apply by mister_playboy · 2010-06-29 11:46 · Score: 1

In my experience all 3.5" externals use a separate power supply.

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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will

Not enough... by toxique · 2010-06-29 04:01 · Score: 0

Still not enough space to store my pr0n

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- This can't be... - Be what? Be real?

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by TheRaven64 · 2010-06-29 04:06 · Score: 3, Interesting

I had a dual P3, which was not too expensive. Before that, I turned down a dual 200MHz PPro for free. The BP6 (which took two Celerons) made dual-CPU cheap, although it was still quite cool.

Hard drives have been 'multicore' for a while now. A typical drive incorporates multiple platters. The problem is that a failure in one typically results in all of them dying. There are roughly three things that can go wrong with a drive:

The controller dies (affects everything it is controlling).
The drive motor dies (prevents the heads moving)
Some grit gets under the head and damages the platter (as the grit moves around, can damage all platters).

It might be interesting if they could build thinner drives, where you had only a single platter but everything else (controller, motors, and so on) replicated so that you could have RAID 1 / 5 / Z in a smaller physical form factor.

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I am TheRaven on Soylent News

Epic homebrew RAID? by SharpFang · 2010-06-29 04:16 · Score: 1

Extra PCI/PCIX USB controller cards (on top of the motherboard built-in USB) cost peanuts and provide LOTS of ports (vs pretty expensive and limited RAID cards).
Massive RAID over many (USB) controllers pretty much negates the speed penalty for USB vs SATA et al. Can be done in software.
The drives being external don't require massive internal PC power supply to power up a lot of them, or a dedicated PC case to host them all.
USB is hotswap out of the box.

Sounds like a dream solution for homebrew RAID of epic proportions. Like (raw)~100TB for $8k

(there's still the matter of power efficiency left... all these power supplies wasting power... but I guess some tinkering could solve that.)

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45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by icebike · 2010-06-29 04:37 · Score: 1

3GB?

Read closer. We are talking terrabytes here.

Your entire poem stash and your stolen music collection all in one place.

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Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by icebike · 2010-06-29 04:40 · Score: 1

We should be safe now.
Why would anyone need more than 640k.

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Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.

Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 04:44 · Score: 0

3TB is all you will ever need!!!

His signature by Pseudonymus+Bosch · 2010-06-29 04:46 · Score: 3, Funny

So you fixed that for him!

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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by MBGMorden · 2010-06-29 05:10 · Score: 1

Yeah, typo on my part :). Ironically though I do remember my first 1GB drive (I think I got it around 1996). Seemed infinite at the time compared to what I was stepping up from (80MB). Sadly that 1GB drive was also my first experience with drive failure - it died just over a year from purchase. :(

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"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain

This guy doesn't know what he's talking about by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 05:17 · Score: 0

You have a really weird case going on there, and nobody should interpret that as damning of software RAID. In fact, using any modern software RAID would have fixed your problem, rather that caused it.

Let's look all the top 3 bizarre things about your situation.

You're using third-party drivers that don't come with your OS. That means they're not on rescue disks, etc. Most of the time, when people say software RAID, they're talking about, say, Linux's md driver. (Windows probably has something like that, but I'm not sure.)
You're using the worst-of-all-worlds compromise between hardware and software RAID: software-implemented RAID that is tied to a hardware dongle. Both hardware RAID and software RAID are objectively better than that sort of abomination. You'll never find any aspect to that approach, which isn't either matched or outclassed by both of the others. That kind of RAID ought to be called "stupid RAID."
[troll]You're using Windows and complaining about reliability.[/troll]

And you have the nerve to tell someone "bad idea" when they suggest software RAID, based on your experience? That's like telling people, "don't use hammers, because I once had a screwdriver and stuck it in my ear, causing bad things to happen."

Re:This guy doesn't know what he's talking about by sunspot42 · 2010-07-03 12:34 · Score: 1

You're using the worst-of-all-worlds compromise between hardware and software RAID: software-implemented RAID that is tied to a hardware dongle. Both hardware RAID and software RAID are objectively better than that sort of abomination.
By that standard, ALL software RAID solutions are a "worst-of-all-worlds" compromise between hardware & software. The OS & software RAID solution have to be able to see the drives - and have the correct software to detect, access and possibly rebuild the array - before they work. If yer handy dandy boot disc can't accomplish all that right off the bat, you're either gonna need to build a new box or access an existing box and build a boot disc that can get you back in touch with your drive controller, your drives and that array.

In LOCs by psydeshow · 2010-06-29 05:20 · Score: 1

3TB is a lot. But you would still need at least 4 of these drives to hold a Library of Congress.

Of course, with the LOC archiving all of Twitter, we may never see a single drive with LOC capacity.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by spire3661 · 2010-06-29 05:27 · Score: 1

RAID is not backup. Your post doesnt make a lot of sense. Ive had too many drive failures over the years to think RAID is anything but a quick restore system.

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Good-bye

Why does anyone need such a thing for home use? by mikein08 · 2010-06-29 05:34 · Score: 0, Flamebait

I can understand the need if you run a business, large or small. But for home use? Unless you are downloading movies by the dozens, I don't see how you can use that much disk space. But then, I'm an old geezer and I don't live my life on the web or at my computer ... I like to get outside a lot ... 30 years ago, a 3tb disk drive was totally unimaginable. I was operations manager for a university which ran 2 mainframes and one mini-computer, and I'm guessing we didn't have a gb of disk storage for all three computers. My how times change ...

Re:Why does anyone need such a thing for home use? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 08:41 · Score: 0

3 TB comes very easily in home use when you are hobbyist for video shooting or photographing. In one day you can very easily shoot 16GB photos. Delete 50% of them and you still would get 8GB.
With videos, we are right away talking about hundreds of gigabytes when having a HD camera with few batteries so they are not the limitation but the storage. The RAW material comes very easily with few hoursh to so big that you need 1.5TB drives. And more you shoot (example, you are making sport demos etc), more you need.
But for 90% of personal computer users, they do not need more than 20-40GB and everything else is for empty marketing trick.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 05:44 · Score: 0

The enclosure (USB/Firewire) doesn't avoid the capacity limit problem. There is a limit of 2TB volumes - it is a 32bit Windows PC problem. There could also possibly be BIOS boot support issues in a number of PCs that haven't gotten with the times (such as your BIOS only supporting 28bit LBA instead of 48bit), so your mileage may vary, but it's not a problem for Macs and Linux (on decent PCs/servers), as those OSes and hardware already have EFI or upgraded BIOS chips to support massive filesystems.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Chowderbags · 2010-06-29 05:51 · Score: 1

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -Albert Bartlett I'd attribute it to a combination of not understanding exponents, the bureaucracy of inventing, investing in, and integrating a new standard, and that such standards are designed to solve the current problem (with the lowest feasible overhead to get things off the ground now), rather than plan based around what would last for 10 or more years after the standard actually gets adopted.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by drsmithy · 2010-06-29 06:08 · Score: 1

As I understand it, the modern drives work fine on everything post-XP. We just have this weird ten-year gap in operating systems where Microsoft fucked up on releasing an update.

10 years ? XP isn't even 10 years old _today_. It was a bit over 5 years between XP and Vista.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by X0563511 · 2010-06-29 06:11 · Score: 1

Neither does yours. He doesn't say -anything- about backups.

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For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by X0563511 · 2010-06-29 06:14 · Score: 1

I don't think it's even that bad.

All the BIOS needs to do is seek to the first sector and load what it finds into RAM and sick the CPU on it.

The bootloader and/or OS can deal with it from there. Isn't that what we have been doing for years now? (we being everyone EXCEPT Windows victims)

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For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by X0563511 · 2010-06-29 06:15 · Score: 1

Did you break your '.' key?

--
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...

Not a RAID replacement, but a good offline backup by general_ka.os · 2010-06-29 06:44 · Score: 1

Every tool is designed with a specific use in mind. It seems to me this was designed more as a back-up solution, not as a primary drive. If used as a primary drive, it will be difficult to keep data organized. Also there is the danger of a single drive failure causing the loss of 3TB of data. It seems to me the best use of this drive is as an entire system offline backup / disaster recovery solution. Keep your RAID, and continue to back up irreplaceable files (family photos, financials, etc) on media (DVD). Use this drive to do a full system back-up every "x" days, and maintain a history of past back-ups.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 07:48 · Score: 0

Planned obsolescence

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 07:59 · Score: 1, Insightful

A symptom of people choosing "cheap" IDE/ATA over SCSI long ago. Or rather, the consumer computing industry has always been about buying "cheap and good enough" for now and having to buy again to work around the limitation of the cheap standard. (Ahem, Windows PCs).

If people had gone SCSI, we would have avoided the 340MB limit, 1GB limit, 2GB limit, 120GB limit, 132GB limit... As SCSI has always been block addressed.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 09:24 · Score: 0

IIRC, that's not a huge deal...you just can't have a single partition that's more than that size. I'm pretty sure even XP can use a disk that size, you just have to use multiple sub-2.1TB partitions.

The bigger issue is with booting off these new disks using XP. One of the ways they're increasing capacity is by moving from 512 byte sectors to 4k sectors. This is a seemingly-overdue change anyways since most modern filesystems use 4k clusters. The firmware in the drives is able to provide the OS with the appearance of 512 byte sectors, but it's still using 4k sectors internally. Unfortunately, XP has a nasty habit of putting the start of the first partition at LBA 63 which causes the filesystem clusters to be misaligned with the physical sectors on the drive. The result is that many write operations which should only need to overwrite a single sector require an extra read-write on an adjacent sector. The performance hit from this is pretty significant.

By making the drive external, it doesn't get used as a boot disk, doesn't have an MBR and the firmware can ensure that the drive is partitioned starting at LBA 0 so that everything is aligned properly.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 09:33 · Score: 0

What I'd be much MORE interested in is taking 4 of these things and putting them into my FreeNAS RAID setup

Yeah, but -click- -click- it's a Seag -click- -click- -click- gate drive. How trust -click- -click- worthy are they?

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by LoudNoiseElitist · 2010-06-29 11:07 · Score: 1

XP is damn near 9 years old. That's close enough to 10.

Power Supply by turkeyfish · 2010-06-29 12:38 · Score: 1

The Seagate PN-9KWA2L500 ("Free Agent Go) - a 1 TB drive draws its power solely from the USB port. (2,0). I picked up mine at COSCO. They are about 1" thick unlike many somewhat smaller drives at about 3/4", which is nice because they fit into pockets easily. Evidently, this was a bit of a problem for COSCO as customers were evidently "pocketing" them without paying, they are so easy to carry.

If you are right, it would greatly diminish its usefulness, to me at any rate.

Another feature missing from the drive above is USB rather than SATA interface. These things are relatively slow, but not all that bad, so long as you are not transferring huge blocks of data, but rather individual image files (~10MB each).

Nonetheless, it is interesting to see this market segment develop as the past few years have seen some pleasant improvements over what was available just 3-4 years ago.

Re:Power Supply by billybacs · 2010-06-30 02:25 · Score: 0

Agreed. I bought a 640GB ext a year and a half ago for a bit over $100, and it requires an external power source. I typically don't mind the slowness of them, but you're right. Once you get close to GBs of data, it's a massive pain to transfer data.

Imagine USB to USB! That took half the night to move all my stuff off a 250 to that 640...granted I had an X41 Tablet at the time..-_-

SATA in USB enclosures by turkeyfish · 2010-06-29 12:41 · Score: 1

Interesting. Do you know the makes and models? Sizes?

Re:SATA in USB enclosures by omnichad · 2010-06-29 13:33 · Score: 1

You seem surprised, but here is one quick example: Seagate ST910004FAA2E1

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by maxume · 2010-06-29 13:29 · Score: 1

Or it just makes good sense to save $0.05 each on hundreds of millions of components at the cost of making some dweeb whine that his 9 year old computer can't easily interface with new stuff.

--
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-06-29 18:33 · Score: 0

Agreed!

Jesus Christ, just set the limit to a Petabytes and be done with it. We won't have to deal with that for another ~5 years or so.

Intel SSD + external enclosure by Krischi · 2010-06-29 22:44 · Score: 1

Just stick an Intel SSD into a 2.5" external enclosure. There are several out there that are USB-powered. I use a Raidsonic Icy Box 262 for this purpose, and it does it job just fine, drawing power from an USB connector, and providing full SATA-2 speeds over the eSATA connector.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by LordKronos · 2010-06-30 00:12 · Score: 1

making some dweeb whine that his 9 year old computer can't easily interface with new stuff.

You are spot on there! For example, lets just look at one limitation: the 137GB barrier. Breaking that barrier required an upgrade to 48-bit LBA. The 48-bit LBA standard was made in 2002. Western digital shipped a 160GB hard drive in 2004. Lets see....2002 to 2004....yep, that seems to be about 9 years to me.

Re:Ugh. Seriously? by drsmithy · 2010-06-30 02:38 · Score: 1

XP is damn near 9 years old. That's close enough to 10.

Uh huh. But it wasn't three and a half years ago when Vista was released. Which is why statements about how "we just have this weird ten-year gap in operating systems" are wrong.

The solution is much simpler. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-01 03:28 · Score: 0

Don't collect so much rubbish.

Normal people making a few videso and snapping a few pictures don't need 3TB of disk space.

You will never watch the 200 or 300 movies you have, or if you watch them all, how many times will you watch each one? What is stopping you deleting it after watching it a fourth or fifth time?, you will not listen to the 2000 or 3000 tracks you have religiously, er, backed up, you will never see agains most of those 20000 snaps of your holidays or Xmas (many of you will brag about your much inflated numbers of digital noise, and will plead about how much you "need" all this data, most likely you don't need to hoard that much).

Now, if you are a serious amateur doing proper videography or filmography, then perhaps you need lots of disk space, but even then, some of the videos you produce will be crap and not worth keeping in the long term, think about a prolific film star or director. They will have 100 hours worth archiving about their work at most ( I am still thinking personal data here, OK?), even then it is not uncommon to hear that thes people don;t watch themselves at all anuy way.

So why do you need 3TB? Really, why?

RAID is piece of mind. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-01 03:40 · Score: 0

But the respite it gives you is brief if you are serious about achieving those nonsensical 99.99999 or whatever availability people like to claim (you need clustered hosts for that).

For home use it avoid a single point of failure and reminds you that you should be backing up your data, just in case .....

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