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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.

19 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?

    --
    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.

    4. Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... by drsmithy · · 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).

  3. 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
  4. 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.

    --
    Dvorak on Doomtech
  5. Re:Ugh. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  6. 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.

    --

    today is spelling optional day.

  7. 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?
  8. 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.

  9. Re:One drive are two? by Dancindan84 · · 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.

    --
    "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
  10. Re:Still not very useful. by vegiVamp · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    What a depressingly stupid machine.
  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. Quick chat with Seagate Tech Support: by DWMorse · · 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.

    --
    There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
  14. 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
  15. His signature by Pseudonymus+Bosch · · 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