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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.

13 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. One drive are two? by Snowhare · · 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?

    1. Re:One drive are two? by sarkeizen · · 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.

    2. Re:One drive are two? by sarkeizen · · 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)

    3. Re:One drive are two? by Snowhare · · 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'.

    4. Re:One drive are two? by Snowhare · · 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.

    5. Re:One drive are two? by sarkeizen · · 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!

  2. Re:Ugh. Seriously? by MBGMorden · · 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.

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  3. Meh by jridley · · 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.

  4. I think I know why it's external. by GNUALMAFUERTE · · 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.

    --
    WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
  5. Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by sunspot42 · · 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.

  6. Re:Bigger isn't better. by Maltheus · · 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).

  7. Re:Ugh. Seriously? by TheRaven64 · · 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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  8. Re:Seagate ? No, Thanks ! by FromageTheDog · · 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...