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Seagate Releases 3TB External Drive for $250
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.
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?
Living With a Nerd
External RAID arrays have been around for a while. Is this just a conventional RAID0 or really a 3 TB single drive?
a whole lot of Pr0n
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
That's more capacity than my entire four-drive RAID for just $250.
Yeah, but which would you trust more with your data.
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
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.
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.
Dvorak on Doomtech
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
It's not a 5400RPM 'LP' drive is it? That would suck. The press release doesn't seem to say...
We use HFS Plus, you insensitive clods!
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?
Except for, you know, raw capacity. Oh, and price.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
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.
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.
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.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
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.
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.
Wasn't there an announcement by Intel or someone that they are dropping BIOS not too long ago?
A 3TB USB2 drive is like sticking a slim straw into a McDonald's milkshake.
"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" -- Kurt Vonnegut
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.
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.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
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.
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.'"
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 based on user account deletion
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.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
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.
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?
come on NO E-sata?
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.
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.
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.
New things are always on the horizon
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.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
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.
The last digit of the acronym makes clear how much redundancy it has. They knew what they were doing when naming these.
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.
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 !
New things are always on the horizon
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.
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
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:
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
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.)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
3GB?
Read closer. We are talking terrabytes here.
Your entire poem stash and your stolen music collection all in one place.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We should be safe now.
Why would anyone need more than 640k.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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
So you fixed that for him!
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
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. :(
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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.
Good-bye
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.
"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.
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.
Neither does yours. He doesn't say -anything- about backups.
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...
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)
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...
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...
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
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.
Unless it's using an e-SATAP connector. (SATA and USB power combined into one connector.)
Not a sentence!
Think harder - one obvious application for a drive like this is as a (relatively) inexpensive online backup for a home NAS.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
XP is damn near 9 years old. That's close enough to 10.
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.
Interesting. Do you know the makes and models? Sizes?
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.
Do 2.5" drives need 12V power, or just 5V? and how many amps?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
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.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
RAID 0 has redundancy, precisely 0 redundancy.
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.
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.
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.
5 volts at about 1/2 amp is typical.
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.