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Seagate Releases 3TB External Drive for $250

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the approaching-infinity dept.

A few anonymous readers noted that Seagate has released a 3TB external drive. This makes it the largest 3.5-inch in its class, and it is available with USB 2, 3, or FireWire. That's more capacity than my entire four-drive RAID for just $250.

10 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Ugh. Seriously? by Pojut · · 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
  2. A lot of eggs in one basket... by Andrewkov · · 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.

    1. Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by hibiki_r · · 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.

    2. Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by MBGMorden · · 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.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    3. Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by XanC · · 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.

  3. Buy two by Nichotin · · 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
  4. Re:One drive are two? by ruiner13 · · 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.

  5. Re:Bigger isn't better. by King_TJ · · 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.

  6. Re:Still not very useful. by vegiVamp · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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    What a depressingly stupid machine.
  7. Re:Ugh. Seriously? by LordKronos · · 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.