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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.

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. 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.

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    WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
  3. 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.

  4. 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