WD Launches 3 Terabyte HD

MojoKid writes "Today, Western Digital announced the world's highest density hard drive, as they reach the 3TB mark with their newest, 5th generation Caviar Green product. The Caviar Green 3TB serves up a super-sized combination of reduced power consumption, lower operating temperature, and a quieter operation. Unfortunately, if you're still using Windows XP, don't expect your system to make full use of any 3TB drive (yet). The problem is that older operating systems, in combination with a legacy BIOS and master boot record (MBR) partition table scheme, face a barrier at 2.19TB. Existing motherboards utilizing BIOS (non-UEFI), GPT ready operating systems like Windows 7 64-bit, and appropriate storage class drivers, can address the entire capacity of hard drives larger than 2.19TB. Another issue is that a number of host bus adapter (HBA) and chipset vendors don't offer driver support for these types of drives. To provide a solution for this compatibility issue, Western Digital bundles an HBA with the Caviar Green 3TB drive that allows the operating system to use a known driver to correctly support extra large capacity drives. This solution is reportedly just temporary until the rest of the industry catches up."

Comments

orly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Into space?

Re:orly?

[Anonymous Coward]

into uranus

Re:orly?

[Lanteran]

3TB of storage.... in space!

The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Combined storage in my house is maybe ~2.5TB. That's 4 machines + external storage. I'm no where near filling it up and my wife has been torrenting all our television for over a year.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[DWMorse]

Good for you. In the last year, I've put about 8.5 TB into my house (without a single torrent) and I could use another 3 TB. Running a small recording studio digitally has it's upsides and downsides.

A 5x 3TB Raid 6 sounds just about right for a nice 9TB assembly. (And yes, I know, Raid isn't a backup, there's tapes for that.)

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[MBGMorden]

Combined storage in my house is maybe ~2.5TB. That's 4 machines + external storage. I'm no where near filling it up and my wife has been torrenting all our television for over a year.

All depends on your needs. The combined storage space in my house is close to 12TB. Most of the drives are full and I'm constantly having to copy things around to make space for new stuff. The fact that my entire DVD library has been ripped to AVI files (including television season/series sets) helps eat up a lot of that though.

Helps a lot in that I have a 1.9-year old niece who comes over all the time wanting to watch Elmo, Charlie Brown, and various other Disney movies. She actually knows how to work the DVD player herself, but she's not exactly careful with the discs (my Finding Nemo disc is now completely unplayable :'(), but in the interest of making sure my discs don't all die horrible deaths, they're now being streamed from a MythTV server . . .

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Hatta]

I think Ken Thompson said, "The steady state of disks is full". No matter how big drives get, you'll eventually fill it up. At which point you'll need a bigger one, or you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time (any really) moving shit around and deciding what to delete.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[tompaulco]

I once thought that as well, but I put a 320 GB secondary drive in my PC at home about 4 years ago, and it is still only about half full.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[alen]

and what do you do with these torrents? hoard them?

i DVR a bunch of cartoons for my eldest son and keep the 3 latest ones. my wife DVR's a few shows and erases them after she watches them. i also have netflix for a few other cartoons and stuff to watch.

what exactly is the point of hoarding TV shows? most of them you watch once and don't want to watch again. stuff like Friends and Everybody loves Raymond is constantly playing reruns

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[cynyr]

that is what is eating up my 1TB drive atm, except it's my kids, not my niece.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[cynyr]

rip your dvds let me know how fast the storage goes then.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[jedidiah]

My DVR alone has 2.5TB of space dedicated to it just for storing recordings.

It stores those recordings in h264, so I get much more recording time than with MPEG2.

Once you get into HD video, 3TB really isn't that much. Individual recordings can be 35G.

A few years of saving what you would have watched on cable can easily fill up several TB. This could be torrents or "purchases" from iTunes.

Apple really should have a home server of it's own by now just for this reason alone: DVD Jukebox for iTunes purchases.

Defaulting to network storage for other iTunes stuff would make a lot of sense too.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[cynyr]

well with a DVR the content is playable before it finishes. With torrents it isn't. Also depending on your tracker there may be ratio requirements, which makes it a good idea to simply hang on to them for a while and let them seed.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally grab entire series of re-runs, put them up on TVersity, and watch them at my leisure via the 360. This is stuff I already have on DVD, but physical discs and finding the episode I am after is a PITA. The DVR is used for new TV.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[CAIMLAS]

What I want to know is: how can you justify the cost of tape? And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?

What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not? Assuming no significant sunk cost for tape hardware, you're still looking at similar if not greater costs per GB of tape storage as you would be disk, whether you're looking at LTO 3 or LTO 5. Throw in $1,000 to $3,000 for your standalone chassis tape drive... you'd have to burn through hundreds of single-use 1.5TB hard drives to justify tape on cost (and even then, questionably - tape is more expensive per raw GB than drives).

The whole 'raid isn't backup' argument seems a misnomer to me these days. Yes, bad backup practices make tape less reliable, but it's much more difficult to put good practices in place for effective tape backup than it is for hard disks. With filesystems like ZFS (with CoW and a number of other nice features that make tape further irritating in comparison), I don't see the point at all.

No, raid isn't a backup in and of itself - but neither is a single tape. A raid5 live copy of your data with periodic/daily/whatever diffentials to external drive, however, seems like a pretty good backup to me.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Eponymous Coward]

You're backing up 8+ TB onto tape? What kind of tapes and drive? I always thought the only practical way of backup up multi-TB drives was with other multi TB drives.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[netsuhi.com]

rip your dvds let me know how fast the storage goes then.

OK Just ripped all my DVDs and they take up 0GB. I do not want to re-watch anything enough for it to be worth buying.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[BlackSnake112]

Because it is very possible that 2 or more drives can fail at the same time. Not probable but possible. If the data loss is not an issue then by all means do not have some other kind of backup. To many people the data loss is bad, so they do a backup.

Speaking from my own experience I have seen drives just go bad. They were not even hooked up. They worked one day, and were dead the next time they were used. I tried the hard drive as a backup solution. The hard drive (which was kept in an anti static bag when ever it was not being used) just died. Instead of one backup, I now have at least 3 external backups of important things.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Kjella]

I think that's almost entirely due to everybody storing their own copies. Searching the BluRay store at amazon.com I get 9352 titles. If we assume 50 GB/disc - some are smaller, some are duplicate versions and some are multi-disc sets but not too far off - then that's 500 TB. Is that much? It's 133 of these drives, and that'd store pretty much all high-def content produced to date. It's out of the league of a home server but if there was such a thing as Spotify for movies it would be a piece of cake. If we'd all stream our video the reason most people buy TB-size discs would be gone. Yes, I know there are exceptions but those are exceptions.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Eponymous Coward]

Once upon a time, I used to have a nice, but small DVD collection. Then I realized I was never watching them and so I got rid of them, both physical and digital copies.

With Netflix, Hulu, Redbox, a DVR, and 1000 channels of satellite TV (and other sources I'm sure), I'm never at a loss for something to watch. I understand that people who collect movies and cork-sniffing videophiles may want to curate a personal video collection, but I don't think most people will.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[anUnhandledException]

The issue is most people saying "I got a RAID" ONLY have a raid.

So maybe it is better phrased that ONLY a RAID isn't a backup. The issue is if you only have a single copy of your data no matter how redundant the method of storing that single copy can become corrupt.

Having a drive (or RAID) and a backup RAID provides a high level of fault tolerence and may make sense where cost of tape storage is simply not warranted.

Even better would be:
storage RAID
backup RAID
offsite backup (via cloud)

The problem is many users will take a 2TB drive RAID it and the files stored there are the only copy. That isn't a backup it is merely a more fault tolerant method of primary storage.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[NFN_NLN]

What I want to know is: how can you justify the cost of tape? And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?

The whole 'raid isn't backup' argument seems a misnomer to me these days.

You're actually arguing with yourself. 'RAID' isn't a backup, it provides fault tolerance for uptime.

A separate and off-site storage target is a valid backup. In fact, most tapes are being replaced with "virtual tape" which is nothing more than disk backed RAID storage located in a different area than the source data.

Stop confusing RAID (within a single storage array) and a separate storage array that also happens to be RAID.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Hylandr]

better to be an asshole than a pussy

Well, they say you are what you eat, Dick

Let me help you with that.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[anUnhandledException]

Your only option is an autoloader which isn't cheap.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840119028

Single LTO 3 drive plus 8 tape magazine. 3.2TB capacity (6.4TB w/ compression YMMV)

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Eponymous Coward]

Yeah, but why? It sounds like you have hundreds of hours of video stored locally. Do you really watch that much tv?

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[KuNgFo0]

Unfortunately these are Western Digital "Green" drives. Speaking as someone who works at a company that sells RAID devices, their Green drives suck for RAID. They're slow (they're usually not even 5400 rpm), and they like to timeout and drop out of the RAID frequently. We saw this same scenario when 2TB drives were released and only the low-speed/low-power drives were available at the beginning. We'll have to wait a few months before proper 3 TB drives are out there.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[NFN_NLN]

and what do you do with these torrents? hoard them?

i DVR a bunch of cartoons for my eldest son and keep the 3 latest ones.

Now that he's 30 he should consider moving out of your basement and getting his own DVR.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[franciscohs]

I'm on the same situation. I wonder why no one build big fat drives with lots of capacity, I would definitely buy a 5 1/4 bay hard drive of, say, 6 TB or more.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[0123456]

Yeah, but why? It sounds like you have hundreds of hours of video stored locally. Do you really watch that much tv?

Buying a few terabytes of disk space is much easier than convincing your girlfriend that she really didn't need to watch that episode of CSI Milton Keynes from last March that you just deleted.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[anUnhandledException]

Honestly I find that I archive less and less.

Donated all my DVD (almost never watch them again) to charity (nice writeoff).

Quick what % of your DVD have you watched at least 10 times. Hell how many of them have you watched only once or twice?

Storing DVD is of dubious value IMHO. In 20-30 years it will be the digital equivelent of people who stored every single newspaper in case they needed.

With netflix, VOD (both from cable and online), hulu, itunes, redbox, etc the need to store TB of pre-generated content seems quaint.

Take the cost of the DVD + cost (in $ value of your time) of ripping them + cost to archive them divided by number of uses. If it is more than $2 - $3 a view you are paying more than just paying per use.

Now people w/ lots of personal unique content (family photos, video, original composistions, personal files, etc) storage makes sense. One can't simply go to a redbox pay $2 and get a copy of last summer vacation video.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[anUnhandledException]

No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.

To each his own. I find a Tivo hacked w/ 2TB drive to be more than enough storage for content. Old stuff gets deleted. Who CARES?

There have been physical packrats for years. We are just seeing the digital equivelent today.

Oh noes if I don't have every single episode of that TV show that went off the air 3 years ago I will just die. Granted I haven't watched any of them in 2 years but YOU NEVER KNOW maybe someday I might need to watch them and they won't be there.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[canajin56]

I was working at a government research center in the 90s. Their main server had a 4 drive raid 1 array. One day there was an emergency shutdown because 3 drives suffered near-simultaneous head crashes. I think nobody told the IT guy you are supposed to make sure all your RAID drives came from different batches. Either that or somebody kicked the damn thing and didn't own up to it ;) They did regular tape backups, too, so it wouldn't be the end of the world. Just maybe a day or two of work lost. Well, if you only use your network drive, rather than using your network drive as a backup ;)

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Smauler]

And yes, I know, Raid isn't a backup, there's tapes for that.

Heh, shows how much you know... I run RAID-0.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Vectormatic]

No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.

you never had a girlfriend did you?

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[rufty_tufty]

No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.

One piece of advice I got given many years ago, "there is no such thing as a sane woman, just pick your insanity". Applies to men too don't get me wrong. If I can pick a woman who gets annoyed over weird TV programs I have no interest in I'll pick that any day over some of the stuff I've put up with over the years.

All that gross sexism over and done with a fairer version of the above advice would be people are different, even your best friend or life partner will piss you off about some weird stuff at time. It's ok, just remember you do it to them too.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[psbrogna]

Tapes are useful as a removable & portable media. RAID arrays generally are not as portable. The RAID array won't do me much good when my house burns down- off-site media is the protection in this case. Large external hard drives are a suitable substitute which MAY lower the $/GB of off-siting content in certain scenarios (relative to even the most recent tape tech). I've been using Hitachi G-Drives in place of LTO and have reduce the media cost.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[jtownatpunk.net]

Amateur. :)

My fault-tolerant array is up to 12tb (14 if you count parity) with room to add another 14tb before I run out of ports and drive bays. On the one hand, it's nice to be able to grab most of my content off the Tivo and store it exactly as it was streamed by the cable company. On the other hand, 6+ gigs per hour really adds up fast.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[drsmithy]

What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not?

Generally speaking: transportability, reliability and longevity. Potentially performance, as well, depending on how you're connecting those "backup drives".

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Hatta]

What about all that stuff you can't get on Netflix? All those episodes of MST3K and Doctor Who will likely never see a DVD release. It's important to have them mirrored on as many hard drives as possible, or we'll lose more than we already have.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[bigstrat2003]

Thank you for demonstrating why I prefer being single. If I can't have a girlfriend/wife who is laid back about stuff, I won't have one at all.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[sexconker]

What I want to know is: how can you justify the cost of tape?

Tape is cheap.

And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?

RAID isn't backup. It's fault tolerance.

What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not? Assuming no significant sunk cost for tape hardware, you're still looking at similar if not greater costs per GB of tape storage as you would be disk, whether you're looking at LTO 3 or LTO 5. Throw in $1,000 to $3,000 for your standalone chassis tape drive... you'd have to burn through hundreds of single-use 1.5TB hard drives to justify tape on cost (and even then, questionably - tape is more expensive per raw GB than drives).

Properly stored tape will last eons.
Hard drives will not.
Tapes are more durable.
Broken tapes are user-serviceable.
Data is far more recoverable from broken tape than from a broken hard drive.
The costs you cite are ridiculous for a simple home setup.

The whole 'raid isn't backup' argument seems a misnomer to me these days.

And people with this mentality still seem like idiots to me, these days. You're wrong. Plain and simple. Online storage is vulnerable to getting fried. Offline storage is monumentally less so.

Yes, bad backup practices make tape less reliable, but it's much more difficult to put good practices in place for effective tape backup than it is for hard disks.

How so? Insert tape, go, wait, label, toss (literally, toss) into box. Put it in a fire safe if you want.

With a hard drive you've got: Connect drive, go, wait, disconnect drive, carefully store drive somewhere.

Were you planning on using an internal drive? Power down, open case, connect drive, boot up, etc.

External drive that you keep attached? That's not a backup - it's simply a live copy.

With filesystems like ZFS (with CoW and a number of other nice features that make tape further irritating in comparison), I don't see the point at all.

Backups store bits.
File systems store files.
The two are COMPLETELY separate. No matter how robust and fault tolerant a file system is, it is still prone to COMPLETE DESTRUCTION due to hardware failure, system corruption, etc.

No, raid isn't a backup in and of itself - but neither is a single tape.

A offline copy of live data is the definition of a backup.

A raid5 live copy of your data with periodic/daily/whatever diffentials to external drive, however, seems like a pretty good backup to me.

RAID 5 is costly and slow compared to RAID 0 (which is not RAID). If you're doing backups already, why the hell would you go with RAID 5? Downtime is irrelevant for 99.9999% of home users. The bottleneck in downtime will be the time it takes to get a replacement drive shipped out, not the time it takes to rebuild the array.

If you think you're a special type of user who can't possibly stand losing, in the worst case scenario, 24 hours worth of data, then go with RAID 1+0. Faster than RAID 5 with a hot spare, just as fault tolerant, you get the same storage, and when shit goes wrong and you have to rebuild you're not running with degraded performance.

The bottom line is that RAID is not, and never will be, a backup solution. It will not, and never will be, considered part of any backup plan. RAID is for staying online. Nothing more.

A lot of dumb fucks like to shit on anything that's old, a little slow, or a little cumbersome (or more accurately, unfamiliar to them), without ever stopping to think of why things are done a certain way.

Tape is the best backup method we have today.
There's a reason it's still the standard.
There's a reason it's been around for as long as it has.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[jgagnon]

One can't simply go to a redbox pay $2 and get a copy of last summer vacation video.

Not yet, that is... :p

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[WuphonsReach]

My vote is that either someone kicked it, or they had a power issue.

4-way RAID1 is interesting... I thought I was being paraoid at 3-way RAID1. I figure, if I've got a 3-drive unit and the option of going 2-way RAID1 with a hot-spare vs 3-way RAID1 with no spare, I'll go for the latter. Which keeps my data safer instead of it being sitting on a single spindle while the hot-spare spins up and synchronizes. Things have to go really pear-shaped to lose 3 drives at once.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Vectormatic]

a laid back girl surely isnt impossible, what is impossible is to find a girl who is rational about everything.

My girlfriend can be quite cool about a lot of stuff, and she takes a lot of weird stuff from me, but convincing her we dont need to keep every single movie we come across is not by any means easier then buying a few extra disks

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[fifedrum]

I don't believe you can purchase a chassis with an externally accessible hard drive array, hard drives and carriages for the drives to emulate a tape changer for less money than you can purchase a large capacity tape changer and the equivalent storage in tapes.

If you're backing up a small office, home office or tiny corporate environment, then go for it, just use some externally accessible array that can export everything JBOD and manage the device by hand, but if you need more than a few drives to back things up, the overhead and maintenance cost would quickly outstrip the cost of the tapes, drive and tape changer.

at $0.0375 per GB for LTO4 tape, the hard drives aren't really cheaper either.

What I do is have a multi TB array used for disk-to-disk backups and as a cache for the disk-to-tape backups. Write the disk backups as virtual tapes, then shuffle off the virtuals to real tapes. That leaves the latest full backup and incremental on hard drive, and old backups on tape. Someone deletes a file, just restore it from hard drive backups. Someone deletes a file and realizes it was last week, recall the tapes and restore it from there if there is business justification for the added cost to retrieve one file.

As prices drop, and capacities increase, the solution to this equation changes to favor hard drives as tapes aren't increasing in capacity or decreasing in price to match hard drives.

Give it three years and then start grinding up your old tapes.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[denobug]

Amen Brother, Amen. I'll drink to that!

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

1998 called. You are a horrible, evil person for backing up the content you purchased for legitimate, personal use.

Not.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[CAIMLAS]

Properly stored tape will last eons.
Hard drives will not.

That's not a problem for backups. It's a problem for archives, which are an entirely different (and immensely more compounded) issue.

apes are more durable.

Durable, compared to what?! Aside from being much more volatile than a drive to ESD, they're also not hermetically sealed. The plastic tape itself stretches, gets kinks, and can get stuck - even without improper physical operation.

Broken tapes are user-serviceable.

This is hardly a benefit, because - unless it's the only copy - you've got another set.

Proper backups entail 2 full revisions/data sets, differentials, and the live copy. At least. Short of your live systems, your daily/etc. differentials, as well as two full week data sets?

I'd also say it's debatable how 'user servicable' a tape is if it's been damaged, given the speed at which current tape systems move, the sensitivity of the electronics, and the relative density of the tape. It does not take much dirt or oil to damage your tape drive.

Data is far more recoverable from broken tape than from a broken hard drive.

Provided you write as a an unencrypted/uncompressed stream to the tape, yes. But then you're talking about half the data density that's advertised.

The costs you cite are ridiculous for a simple home setup.

Are they? They're not for the data amounts mentioned. an LTO3 tape (400GB) is $35+. An LTO5 tape (1.5TB) is over $110. Both are significantly more than hard drives of similar capacity, which have electronics to detect and correct media errors on the fly, giving you significantly better 'wiggle room'. Let's not forget that you've also got to buy a tape drive: find me one that's new and under $900 and worth putting in the role of 'backup'; I've yet to see one.

I read recently that drive plater errors occur roughly once every 2TB of transfered data. How often does a backup happen where the archive is corrupt and 'off by one'? I'm guessing it's somewhat more frequently than once every 2TB.

Tape backup is an epic fail when you're using large files or tapes smaller than your files; splitting archives across tapes significantly reduces the reliability of your backups.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[tompaulco]

I'm sure that would take a lot of space, but I can't imagine why I would want to do rip my DVDs onto my computer when they are already in a format that is easy to handle and compatible with my DVD player.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[CarpetShark]

"And yes, I know, Raid isn't a backup"

No, but snapshots on RAID are, especially if that RAID is off-site. Personally I couldn't be bothered with stuff like tapes these days.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[CarpetShark]

"they like to timeout and drop out of the RAID frequently."

If "green" means nearline, I think that's the point. Useful for backups I suppose, not for online, rapid access.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I LOVE the '1.9 yr old' description.

Thanks for standardizing this for me.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Things have to go really pear-shaped to lose 3 drives at once.

My three disk RAID-1 got nuked by a failing raid controller. All three disks where gone in an instant, no chance of recovering any data. It happens.

The good news is that the array was hourly synchonized to another three disk array, and it was at night when no users were online. No data lost, lesson learned: disks are not redundant if they rely on one controller.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[gertin]

I've been using 8 x 2TB WD Green disks in RAID 5 (mdadm) on a JBOD controller for a while now and I've never had this happen. Maybe the controller keeps them spun up at all times or that WD has fixed it in firmware (since all these disks were manufactured in June 2010 or later). Either way, disks never drop out of the RAID and sequential read/write easily exceeds 300MB/s.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[wagnerrp]

Most people don't have the 30-40mbps connections necessary to stream a single bluray title. Those that do are so heavily oversold, only a small percentage of their user base could be doing so at the same time. The only streaming service that could afford that kind of bandwidth consumption would be one co-located at your ISP.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[anUnhandledException]

Will society been that worse off missing some MST3K 30 years from now? I doubt it.

However I accept the point. The more esoteric the data the more useful archiving it becomes. If we had sane copyright laws most of that stuff would be in public domain and part of the cloud already (making individual backups even more useless).

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe you can purchase a chassis with an externally accessible hard drive array, hard drives and carriages for the drives to emulate a tape changer for less money than you can purchase a large capacity tape changer and the equivalent storage in tapes.

buy some 2nd hand server hardware, say 2-3-year old poweredge with hot swap hard drives.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Hatta]

Will society been that worse off missing some MST3K 30 years from now?

Yes. Yes it would.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Albanach]

I don't believe you can purchase a chassis with an externally accessible hard drive array, hard drives and carriages for the drives to emulate a tape changer for less money than you can purchase a large capacity tape changer and the equivalent storage in tapes.

Thecus have sold NAS boxes with hotswappable drives for a good number of years now starting at a few hundred dollars.

Something like the thecus N5200 will cost about $800 but give you five bays, hot spare, automatic rebuilding and hot swappable drives.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[suutar]

I kind of want to because when they're stored compactly (in boxes in the cabinet under the TV) I forget what I have. For the time being I've got the fileserver that the PS3 plays AVIs from set up with a pile of directories named after the DVDs I own, so I can go through the list, but having the actual video data online would let me move those boxes into a closet or the attic :)

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

The WD "Green" drives are not WD "RAID Edition" hence will exhibit problems when in RAID:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1397

I miss the days when a hard drive was a hard drive and could be thrown in a RAID with no problems :(

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 1.9-year old niece...

You're not one for precision, are you...

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Cytotoxic]

As long as we are trading horror stories...

I had a fully redundant SAN go TU because of a bug in a redundant controller. One controller needed a new battery; on re installation of the controller an entire shelf died. Instantly. Ouch! Still, no problem at that point, because we set up our LUNs to stripe vertically across the shelves - so we could lose a shelf and not go down. That's when the controller started issuing wonky commands and corrupted the rest of the array. Wham, 64 spindles offline in less than a minute. Yeah, that was a great day...

So the lesson is, redundancy is to prevent you from needing a backup. Backups are for when that didn't work.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

well with a DVR the content is playable before it finishes. With torrents it isn't.

It can be, depending on the client and settings.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Cytotoxic]

Since you mention backup to the cloud - does anyone have experience with cloud backup? I'm using a service from Terramark at work that is semi-reasonably priced for corporate services, but out of reach for the home.

At home I'm trying Carbonite, but there is a feature that I really don't like. The backup service from Carbonite only stores copies of files currently on your hard drive. If you delete a file, it goes away on the backup within two weeks. So if I screw up and delete something important and it takes me a couple of months to realize it - well, too bad. I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of situations where something got deleted and it wasn't noticed for a long time.

Anyone have a suggestion for a better online backup service?

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[anUnhandledException]

I use iDrive. Not sure if there is a better service.

iDrive deletes deleted files from the backup also however it has an option to turn off automatic sync (which I do). When you manually sync it warns you of deleted files and asks what to do.

So if I accidentally delete a file I can restore local copy from the archive rather than delete archive to match local.

Sadly if you turn on auto-sync it won't warn or propt you (working very similar to carbonite except the "grace period" is 30 days).

I don't know if there is a better solution than I drive. It just happened to be what I used and it works for what I need.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[rilles]

kids. they watch the same movie over and over again. they also get the DVD grimy and break it. It also allows one to remove the DVD crap and just get to the movie.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

he can join in with your mom

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[LWATCDR]

LTO is more reliable for archive then a hard-drive.
And it is pretty hard to have an off site backup with a live RAID. Not impossible mind you but shipping them to Iron Mountain or taking them to your bank and putting them in a safety deposit box is pretty easy.
Also disaster recovery. What happens if your office burns down? Or if you have a massive power surge? Tornado? Hurricane, or a computer virus that destroys your data?

In a real IT setting you will have a RAID, onsite backup, and an offsite backup. And even with a RAID you may have your RAID array mirrored to another array and you will have several hot standby drives in your array just in case.
You could have a blizzard and have a drive in your array go down. A hot stand by means that you will not be running with out redundancy for any length of time.
Externals do have a place but not for in a serious datacenter. If your data is worth millions or millions of dollars then a few grand for a tape with library will be no problem.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[cskrat]

Recorded media (both analog and digital forms of photographs, audio and video) are as much a part of our cultural heritage as paintings and sculptures from previous eras.

Losing the last copy of a TV show or movie is not much different from losing the last copy of a book. It isn't just the great works that deserve archival, since future generations can learn about the state of society from both low budget movies and merchant ledgers.

And to more directly answer the question in your first sentence, I think it's unfortunate that several of the early episodes of Doctor Who were lost for the purpose of saving warehouse space.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[jedidiah]

> Yeah, but why? It sounds like you have hundreds of hours of video stored locally. Do you really watch that much tv?

If I "bought" stuff, then I want to "keep" it.

What's so hard to understand about that?

It either goes on a shelf in a spiffy case or it sits on a hard drive.

Oh, you thought I should throw money at Apple for months on end FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[jedidiah]

A few tearabytes of disk space and some DVD box sets are a quick and easy way to get carte blanche on the computing expenses.

Putting her favorite shows at her fingertips is the quickest path to the greatest WAF.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[DWMorse]

Since start-to-finish projects only come in sub-terabyte levels, a single 1.6TB LTO4 tape holds that specific project nicely for around $120.

It's more of an archive, than a backup, as others have mentioned. I feel I can trust my Raid to hold recordings and masters for about a month, which is usually all it takes to finish it up.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not?

A 10^-17 uncorrectable bit error rate: SAS / "enterprise" drives are at 10^-16, and SATA / "consumer" drivers are at 10^-15 (or even 10^-14). Manufacturer-stated shelf-life of 20+ years. Not sucking up power while offline in the slot, and not adding to the HVAC costs by generating heat. Not having to worry about corruption if your UPS goes out suddenly (or the generator doesn't start in time). Not having worry about getting fried if a pipe bursts and causes a short in the power cable. Much easier to physically move offsite from both a logistical point of view, as well as fragility of the mechanism.

There's also a plus in being able to be offline. I've heard of more than one case of corruption in a data file or a database table being replicated from the production system to the hot-standby system automatically.

I've also heard of attackers getting in the primary system, and then the online backup system. Much harder to hack a tape on a shelf via the 'net.

There is an upfront cost for tape drives/libraries, but so is there for drive arrays. For media, a (native) 800 GB LTO-4 tape goes for about US$40, while 1.6 TB LTO-5 goes for about $US100; of course depending on the data you can double that with compression. If you do offisting, newer tape drives also does wire-speed AES encryption without using the host's CPU, so you don't have to worry about losing credit card numbers.

A tape library also can be upgraded piece-meal: buy LTO-4 now, wait a few years, keep the library, but upgrade to LTO-6 or -7 when it comes up. Replace media slowly as well. With disks, you generally have to do a wholesale update to the hardware every 3-5 years. A 5 year old library will keep working just fine (and you can start with a small library now, and add to it as needed).

With filesystems like ZFS (with CoW and a number of other nice features that make tape further irritating in comparison), I don't see the point at all.

The ZFS people themselves have stated that CoW and RAID et al. is not backup. It's come up more than once on the zfs-discuss list over the years.

Not everyone needs tape, but if all the copies of your data are online, you need to set things up so that you can go back in time "x" weeks. Tape is great for this.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[coxymla]

Depending on which company that sells RAID devices you work for (Qnap?), it's quite possible that the fault is with your devices and not the drives.
They are just hard drives like any other, after all. They work just fine for most people.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[sjames]

I think the idea is that RAID for your active online storage isn't a replacement for a backup. Now, a second RAID near-line is a perfectly good backup, but it needs to be powered up and tested periodically.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[sjames]

I've seen tape drives go bad such that they would destroy any tape you attempted to read in it. Drives DO just go bad. It's important to periodically spin them up and scan for errors. If any are found, replace the drive and rebuild the RAID. Same deal for tapes.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[BLKMGK]

Agree, in my case I use unRAID which puts all parity on a single drive and uses standard FS for the rest. I get to use all but one drive for storage, can spin down drives not being accessed, and if I DO lose two drives I only lose the data on those two and not the entire array. I can use standard tools to try and recover those drives too. A double drive failure is very scary! I cannot back my stuff up with tape - too costly. But I can recreate most of my stuff and my music is backed up in multiple places. Hrm, need to do that again actually...

So far I've never lost more than one drive but I have lost 5-6 single drives over the years I've been using this software. I've got about 16TB spread over 2 servers mostly because I use one for testing\backups, and the other just for video and music storage. With these new drives I could put a single server up into the 40TB++ range. That's sick!

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[BLKMGK]

Suuure they are - Supermicro makes a very nice 5n3 device that allows you to cram 5 drives where 3 would normally go. Has it's own cooling fan and takes less than 5 power connections too. setup a RAID on that and you're good to go. I use unRAID for my video and backups, works well on standard hardware. Lots of other ways to do this too but with little trouble you too can be rocking 16TB or more - especially with new 3TB drives hitting the streets :-D

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[BLKMGK]

Here's what did it for me. Picture a large rack of DVD in your living room. All nice and alphabetical and tidy - tidying this is a hassle BTW as new DVD are purchased. Now picture the following scenarios... Friend or family comes over and wants to borrow "some DVD" and begins pawing through them. They take a few... weeks go by and you finally get them back. That is mildly irritating but no biggie really unless they come back scratched or get "lost". Now imagine this - you are having some workers into your home to say clean carpets. They walk in the door and stop dead in their tracks looking at the rack "WOW man! That's ALOT of DVD!". Visions of having had your CD collection stolen from your car 3 times race through your head - to include finding some of them at the local used CD shop (where you bought most of them to begin with). This is not a fun feeling and the investment is FAR higher.

Hrm says you - perhaps having all of this media put away in a box somewhere and only having a very friendly user interface like XBMC and a server sitting in the corner streaming them would be smarter.....

I now have a few TVs in my home and each of them have a small ION powered box next to them running Linux with XBMC loaded. I can play any movie I store, any song I store, or stream many kinds of media from my central server without issue. Can display all of my pics this way too. No longer do I worry about someone walking in and spotting my media coming back later to make a quick buck. I do have to worry about them stealing the damned TV - maybe one day I'll have a home that's suited for a projector :-)

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[BLKMGK]

A little commercial snipping and H.264 compression will help solve that. Even if you knock the resolution down it will look better than SD and take up much less space. I've given up storing TV shows at full resolution - takes too much space! I don't mind the "SD" stuff that's been knocked down from HD captures though - it looks good to me. I compress BD too just because I cannot notice the difference and it can take down the file size by at least a third except in weird cases where it gets bigger (lol). DVD though - I don't compress those suckers at all, 4-9Gig is nothing to me :-)

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Compaqt]

I don't think the WD green is designed to be near-online.

Besides, isn't the term "nearline" usually used to describe automatic file retrieval by a robot from tape?

That's a lot different from a hard drive which may be a few milliseconds off from the world's record Barracuda drive speed.

I use it as a main drive, and it's basically fine.

And if you almost never retrieve a file, and the hard drive rests as a consequence, will a few seconds really hurt you after retrieving a file after a few weeks?

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Vlado]

And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?

Because all those pesky keyboards that we use have a "Delete" button...

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Vlado]

AFAIK the purpose of the "Green" product line is not performance (aka RAID), but energy saving. Actually the slogan that the y use for the line is: "Cool, quiet, eco-friendly" High performance and RAID are not mentioned. So combining these drives with RAID systems is probably not what the product-line is intended for...

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Kjella]

True, I was projecting a little based on what Netflix, Hulu, Voddler etc. offer today and in practice you'd have an Akamai-like system around the world. However, it's not like you have to push everything in real time. For TV and movie releases with a fixed release date you could download an encrypted version at night and at release time you get the decryption key. If you want something streaming live you might have to turn down the quality settings down to "normal" 1080p (~11 Mbit), 720p (~5 Mbit) or 480p (~2 Mbit). With use comes bandwidth, ISPs won't be able to hold back progress (except maybe in the US). Checking the bandwidth stats from Norway ~50% of all households can do DVD streaming and ~20% some form of HD today and that many people could get faster lines but don't see the point. If the content came, this revolution could happen quite quickly at least in some parts of the world.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Neil Boekend]

There is a big difference here: he probably uses hard raid. You use soft raid. Most raid controllers have a limit to the recovery time, in some cases this cannot be changed manually. MDADM doesn't have this check. The NON-Raid Edition green drives have an unlimited recovery time. If the controller recovery time is exceeded the controller will drop the disk.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

So the lesson is, redundancy is to prevent you from needing a backup. Backups are for when that didn't work.

True words. Maybe every datacenter should print that above the door, in 1440 point Helvetica...

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[0111 1110]

AFAIK the purpose of the "Green" product line is not performance (aka RAID), but energy saving.

The purpose of the "green" drives is marketing spin to make 1980s era spindle speeds sound like a good thing. "Slow" becomes "saving the planet" or "saving money on electricity" even though the actual power savings are minimal. Maybe a 2-3 watt savings compared to a 7200 rpm drive. I have enough offline 5400 rpm storage as it is. I don't want any more. I'll wait for the overpriced Caviar Black version. Or maybe Seagate will finally at least announce their own 7200 rpm 3TB drive.

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[Yannic]

Unfortunately these are Western Digital "Green" drives...

I agree. I only buy 5-year warranty drives. Once they've outlived their usefulness to me, I can still re-sell them to someone else with the assurance that the drives have a couple of years left on the manufacturer's warranty.

In other words, once you go WD Black you don't go back.

\/\/\/

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[toddestan]

Well, the thing is, the digital packrat doesn't take up much space. Why not keep those old episodes around? It's not like you need to have a wall of VHS tapes to keep that stuff anymore.

Besides, sometimes it's not really worth going through all that stuff just to figure out what to delete or to keep. I can spend hours sorting through the files in those old directories, and maybe reclaim 20GB. Whoohoo, I just saved myself like $2 worth of drive space!

Re:The industry can take all the time it needs

[hesaigo999ca]

I remember firstly digitizing my whole collection, as 4gb dvds in digital format, then I heard about the avi format, and thought I will buy a dvd player that will play avi format and change my whole library to avi.
That having been done, and many downloads later as some had not been able to convert easily (missing codec for sound etc...), I cleared up much space, but to my dismay, I also ended up downloading more content too....browsing the sites does that ...i'll take this, and this one too, and oh yeah, this one would be nice.

Now at 4tb, plus 4tb backups of first 4tb. means I have 8tb.
Some are 1tb drives, others are 500gb....now if I can get my hands on one of these 3tb drives, my life will be less cramped, and unless I find someone to buy my older drives, then I will start finding more stuff to download....the irony of it all.

Cool

[MBGMorden]

Definately cool. Seems like we were stuck at that 2TB size for way too long. On the other hand, it DID result in a rare case of the largest drive capacity being your best bang for your buck. I'm sure for a while these 3TB drives will be more expensive. Still, I was looking at building a new RAID6 NAS box using 2TB drives pretty soon. If the prices are reasonable, I might opt for the 3TB drives instead. 5 of these setup as a RAID6 should yield enough storage space to tie me over for quite a while.

Re:Cool

[Vectormatic]

i've been sticking to 1.5 TBs for the past year, those 5400 rpm green drives simply are unbeatable BFTB wise for the storage server, if 2 TB drives had a better price/size ratio i would have switched in a heartbeat.

Currently at 8,25 TB of storage in the server, allthough over 50% of that is empty currently, but at the present rate, that will take about a year to fill up.

By then i'll look into building a new server, it'd be nice if these 3 TB disks were common good by then

Re:Cool

[wmac]

The only deal breaker is that non of WD-TVs have wireless network inside. Even version 0 of Apple-TV for example included wireless connection. You should either buy on of those USB wireless adapters (and use a USB port on the device which you could use to attach a USB drive) or you should wire up your home.

Neither for me.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that's a good solution, you've never had to wait for a raid rebuild to finish before.

Re:Cool

[CarpetShark]

Seems like we were stuck at that 2TB size for way too long.

Sure does, but I guess the magnetic drive companies have been spending a lot of effort on trying to stay in the game once we all switch to SSDs.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

enough storage space to tie me over for quite a while.

I hope you tow the lion while it ties you over....

(you were looking for "tide over", as in 'a rising tide makes an impassible shallow temporarily passable'. e.g. "I need a few bucks to tide me over at the end of the month". )

Re:Cool

[BLKMGK]

Honestly I think I'd be building using a system that doesn't force you to buy all the same sized disks. With unRAID I only have to make sure the parity disk is as big or bigger than all the others. I'm currently slowly swapping out 750-1.5TB drives to 2TB as they fill up. I REALLY prefer to keep spindle count down if I can - less noise, less heat, but far longer build and format times

Re:Cool

[Vectormatic]

Well, i dont have my drives in RAID, it is just some movies and tv shows, so it is just a bunch of disks mounted into a single share folder, so i am not forced to use same size disks. It is just that from the beginning up to last week (when i filled up the machine with its final 2 disks), the most attractive drives have been 1.5 TBs

Re:Cool

[BLKMGK]

Ah, gotcha! I will tell you, from experience, that at some point drives WILL go bad. That may not be a big deal to you but if losing any of that data is an issue you're going to want to pick some means of protecting it. Be it unRAID, RAID xyz, or ZFS, it's certainly less pain if you have something helping you recover data when a drive dies. Because they DO die, these newer ones seem to be worse than the much older ones too. WD, Seagate, all of them

One thing I do when I install them is write the date put in service on them with a Sharpie so when they die you have an idea as to how long they lived. WD's warranty program has proven painless, Seagate's less so. Seagate requires you to run diagnostics which doesn't always work and I've got at least one Seagate drive they cannot seem to find in their system - it's internal serial number doesn't match the one printed on the outside either. The joys of dealing with HDD manufacturers...

Unfortunatly from the little research I've done so far I'm not going to be able to use these 3TB drives real soon :-(

Re:Cool

[GravityStar]

I think the only reason for not having larger hard drives sooner, is that there are multiple compatibility issues w.r.t. drives larger than 2TB.

There can be issues with bios, sata & raid cards. Best to check if your hardware+software all support that 3TB drive before you upgrade.

Re:Cool

[Vectormatic]

yeah, i know my current scheme is a bit vulnerable, but for now it will do. When my current server is filled up i'll start building a propper new server, with some sort of RAID or whatever.

I do care for my disks pretty well though, they spend their days in a well ventilated case with good dust filters and all, i havent had a disk go bad on me ever..

Re:Cool

[BLKMGK]

Take a close look at unRAID. You might be surprised to find that you can recycle ALL of your hardware used now and maybe even GAIN some space depending upon how much you're dedicating to an OS right now :-)

short-sightedness

[Lord Ender]

If you make SATA controllers, and you didn't see 3TB coming coming years in advance, you need to get the hell out of the hardware business. You are incompetent. Go find another line of work.

Re:short-sightedness

[biryokumaru]

I would counter that if you make any hardware and you waste time and money making it handle things that don't even physically exist, you need to get the hell out of the business business. You are inefficient. Go find another line of work where the free market doesn't exist.

Re:short-sightedness

[NevarMore]

If you make SATA controllers, and you didn't see 3TB coming coming years in advance, you need to get the hell out of the hardware business. You are incompetent. Go find another line of work.

On the other hand if you saw 3TB coming, built SATA controllers that only handled 1TB AND charged an early-adopter premium, THEN conned users into upgrading to the 2TB version later, AND NOW can get them to upgrade again for 3TB you're brilliant and if not rich at least living comfortably.

Re:short-sightedness

[obarthelemy]

good business, though, plenty of 3.0gb compatible sales coming your way !

Re:short-sightedness

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the way of all tech products. Obsolescence built-in. It's been that way since the 80s. You must be very young to have never noticed this before.

Re:short-sightedness

[Jugalator]

I find it hilarious that we aren't over those size limits yet. :-D

A history lesson here:
http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm

Re:short-sightedness

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel chipset integrated SATA controllers are reported to be among those unable to handle more than disks with more than 2TByte. Amateurs.

Re:short-sightedness

[LordHatrus]

Three whole gigabytes? My word, what would one do with all that space. Perhaps store half a DVD? What absolute nonsense.

Re:short-sightedness

[jandrese]

I know for a fact that the SiI 3112 chip can't support even 2TB drives, and that chip is absolutely everywhere since it's a favorite of motherboard manufacturers and add-in card builders. It looks like competence is not necessarily a requirement for success.

Re:short-sightedness

[Machtyn]

Why 3 whole gigabytes, I could own the world! I would triple boot my DOS 6, Windows 95 and Windows 98 SE operating systems. I could complete my computer with a paradox database, MS Office 97, and even Quake and Myst games (I hear that Team Fortress mod and the full motion video and puzzle games are teh win). I'd still have enough space left over to store a few of my most favorite music. My Pentium 133 with 512MB RAM won't know what to do with all that space!

/get off my lawn and all that yadda

Re:short-sightedness

[NJRoadfan]

I remember partitioning my 3.1GB HD because of FAT16's 2.1GB limitation. The BIOS was just new enough to see it without any of that disk overlay software. Landed up dual booting Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95.

Re:short-sightedness

[rufty_tufty]

All the good business practice reasons aside a good reason to have planned obsolescence, I imagine a good reason to not support an infinite size drive is the same reason to still ship 32 bit operating systems.
In the case of an OS doubling the size of your pointers means a lot more data to fetch from memory which increases the size of programs and slows them down. I can imagine in the world of the data structures that are used for hard drives that if you were to build the standard today knowing what we know now we'd have the disk structure described by a bunch of 32 bit pointer each of which could be optionally upgraded to 64 or 128bit. That's be enough for anyone right?
As i understand it it's the legacy description of the disk arrangement that means that you describe your disk as having x platters, y tracks and z sectors that leads to these weird limits because they have been expanded a bit at a time. If you increased each of these to 32 bit pointers you could imagine a massive increase in overhead which while it might be in the noise compared to the latencies of the rest of the hard drive system is a big change in architecture and almost certainly a massive change to the hardware, drivers, test suites, test equipment, OS, OEM equipment etc. While adding a bit here and a bit there is an easy sell to the standards body.

Just a thought anyway...

Re:short-sightedness

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of all that is holy, please tell me you are not in any kind of technology field.

Re:short-sightedness

[LesFerg]

There were a few manufacturers that have put out SATA units with faulty drivers which could not handle more than 1.2 TB. Got into a mess with that myself after installing a 2.5 TB drive and having it fail on a disk check for all space above 1.2. What confused me more was I switched the drive to another mobo from a different manufacturer and chipset, which had exactly the same fault in the driver provided with it.

Bottom line is, if you install a largish hard drive on any SATA system that is not very new, make sure you run a full checkdisk on it before using it (I was surprised that the drive installation notes recommended fast format and no full check), and it shouldn't need to be said, but make sure you have the latest SATA drivers for the chipset used.

Re:short-sightedness

[toddestan]

Shornt term thinking like that is why we spent billions on the Y2K problem. I would think that the free market would put any company you run out of business in a hurry.

Re:short-sightedness

[biryokumaru]

The fact that "we spent billions on the Y2K problem" should tell you whether or not those companies would get "run out of business" by the free market.

I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

There are terabyte 2.5" drives and their volume is about 1/4 of that of a 3.5" drive.

Re:I call bullshit

[anUnhandledException]

volume is kinda meaningless given data is stored on flat platters. Only the surface area on platters are used.

A 2.5" platter has about 40% of the surface area compared to 3.5" platter.

If data was stored 3 dimensionally then maybe volume would matter.

Re:I call bullshit

[Smauler]

3.5" drives are deeper, so you can (and manufacturers do) fit more platters in. So volume does matter in that context.

Re:I call bullshit

[Yvan256]

Just crank the volume to 11!

Re:I call bullshit

[PRMan]

Actually, for the last 3 years or so, the data is actually stored on tiny magnetic towers on the platter: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/storage/2005/04/04/hitachi-announces-3d-hard-drive-revolution-39193673/

Re:I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, the relationship between a 2.5" drive dimensions (l,w,h) compared to a 3.5" drive (L,W,H) is as follows: l = W, w = L/2, h = H/2.
You can physically arrange four complete drives with quadruplicate casing and other redundant shit like 4 controllers in the very same shape and space. The only problem is connectors.

If that's not 4/3 times the density I don't know what is.

Re:I call bullshit

[anUnhandledException]

Perpendicular recording isn't 3D despite Hitachi lame attempt at buzz.

It simply made the surface area of each bit smaller by aligning the bits perpendicular to the surface.

Each platter is still 2D. There is no volume measurement. If you look at a platter you can "see" each bit they aren't stacked on top of each other (yet).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording

Re:I call bullshit

[anUnhandledException]

In theory but not so much practice.

2.5" drives can hold 3 platters. Most 2.5" drives are 2 or 3 platters.

3.5" drives "CAN" hold up to 5 platters however yields tend to be poor, failure rates higher, and a 5 platter 1TB drive will be outperformed by a 3 platter 1TB drive (higher density). Thus in reality most 3.5" drives contain 2 or 3 platters.

Re:I call bullshit

[anUnhandledException]

I fail. I will fix my own mistake.

Hard drive companies often use term platter ambiguously.

A platter has two sides thus can two surfaces to access data from.

Sometimes they will refer to a disc as 4 platter meaning 4 physical platter and 8 surfaces. Sometimes as 4 platters meaning 4 surfaces and 2 platters.

2.5" drives tend to be 1 or 2 platters (up to 4 surfaces & heads).

3.5" drives tend to be 2 to 4 platters (up to 8 surfaces & heads). 5 platters & 10 heads aren't very common anymore.

Still this drive does appear to have the highest density of any physical disk so far.

3TB = / 8 heads-surfaces = 375GB per surface.

375GB * 8 / 4 square inches on 3.5"* drive = min areal density of 750Gb/in^2.**

* 3.5" drive actually have 3" platter roughly 4 square inches of surface area when you exclude the spindle.

** Areal density is likely higher due to short stroking and manufacture marketing rounding drive size to an expected size. i.e. no selling 3.27GB drives. However at a min it is 75Gb/i2 density.

3TB

[celardore]

That's even more data loss to worry about when it goes wrong :) I like my RAID array, but if I didn't have it I'd be afraid of using a single huge drive.

Re:3TB

[Anonymous Coward]

A) Raid is not backup.
B) Oh noes, I lost all my torrented tv shows and my mmorpg installs! How can I ever replace those!?

Besides, if the data does matter, like the recording studio guy, these days the best backup strategy is still an external/removable drive. If you're filling a 3 Tb internal, you have a 3 Tb external to copy to. Size really doesn't matter.

Re:3TB

[biryokumaru]

That's why I keep all my data on DVDs. That way, if one goes bad, I'll only lose 4 gigabytes!

Of course, if I really wanted to be safe, I should use CDs. That way I'd only lose a few hundred megabytes.

But then again, real safety is in 3 1/2" floppies. Then I'd only lose 1.44 megabytes!

5 1/4" floppies! 360 kb!

Single bits stored as rocks! 1/8th byte!

Or I could wait ten years and be the guy saying "1 petabyte drives!? Ha! I'll keep my nice old 3 terabyte drives, thank you very much."

Re:3TB

[Gnavpot]

I like my RAID array

Not as much as I like my redundant RAID array of inexpensive disks.

Re:3TB

[obarthelemy]

Yep, you'll like your raid a lot when you get a virus, a fire, your stuff stolen, deleted by mistake, suffer a big OS bug, app bug, a power surge, a RAID board/PSU failure...

OTOH, a couple of off-line, off-site 3GB disks, and you're safe. Fewer bragging rights, though.

Re:3TB

[MonoSynth]

A RAID array won't save you from fire, floods, system faults and your own stupidity (nobody's perfect). You need backups if you care about your data.

Re:3TB

[hoggoth]

I know I will like it just fine. I run a ZFS file server that all of my PCs use to store almost everything. All of my data is checksummed, every hour a snapshot is made of every changed file at almost zero cost in time and only the changed data takes up space, I have multiple drives RAID'ed together and because of the checksums the system can actually tell when a bit gets flipped not just when a sector goes bad or a drive crashes.
It took me 15 minutes to set it up. I wrote up the install: http://petertheobald.blogspot.com/2010/09/zfs-powered-file-server-in-5-minutes.html

And every once in a while it ZFS SEND's a copy of the entire filesystem to a drive in my office.

Hard drive crash? Covered by the RAID.
Cosmic ray or bad magnetic spot flips a bit? Covered by the checksums.
Virus takes out files? Covered by the snapshots.
Accidentally delete a file? Covered by the snapshots.
House burns down? I'd be very upset but my data would be ok on the copy in my office.

Re:3TB

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the storage they use on ATM machines. You can access that data with the right PIN number.

Re:3TB

[MachineShedFred]

which transmits the data via it's NIC card.

Re:3TB

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS Metadata corrupted & replicated so the pool is not importable??? (Yes I had this happen on an old version of ZFS...)

Re:3TB

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, you'll like your raid a lot when you get a virus, a fire, your stuff stolen, deleted by mistake, suffer a big OS bug, app bug, a power surge, a RAID board/PSU failure...

I can't discount backups having value, but how often do those kinds of things happen, relative to click-of-death? For every time I've wanted to restore a file from a backup, I go through half a dozen drive RMAs.

You might as well say, "Why look both ways when you cross the street, when you're eventually going to be run over by a car with a cloaking device anyway? Dude, you need to invest in armor!"

BTW, a very common usage for these big drives is multimedia collections. You already have a backup, it's call the internet and all its torrents. RAID solves the most common (by far) problem without the tedium of having to "restore" all the the time.

Re:3TB

[hedwards]

Unless you commute via plane, you still aren't properly backed up. You really need the offsite storage to be located in a different geographic region and preferably in two different secure locations.

Re:3TB

[hedwards]

RAID actually increases the likelihood of losses due to fat fingers. Replace the wrong disk and you're screwed. Type in the wrong command when rebuilding and you're screwed.

Re:3TB

[Anonymous Coward]

"network interface controller card" isn't redundant

Re:3TB

[robot_love]

"network interface controller card" isn't redund...

Oh, sorry.

Re:3TB

[Pentium100]

A) RAID helps in case of drive failure. If not then RAID1 is useless.
B) While it seems easy, some episodes of some TV shows may no longer be available when the drive breaks. If it took me a few days to find the torrent then I should back up/archive the TV show.

To the rest - agreed.

Re:3TB

[HiThere]

"Besides, if the data does matter, like the recording studio guy, these days the best backup strategy is still an external/removable drive."

Are you sure about that? I've heard that the spindles tend to freeze if you don't use them for a few years. And that tape, though more expensive, is still a better choice for backup. (Of course, pressed CDs would be an even better choice, but it's far more expensive, and burned CDs/DVDs go bad quickly.)

That said, I generally back up to a spare disk. And don't think of it as a secure backup. Cost rules.

Re:3TB

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/505/

Rock data is unstable, try something smaller.

Re:3TB

[b0bby]

Unless you commute via plane, you still aren't properly backed up. You really need the offsite storage to be located in a different geographic region and preferably in two different secure locations.

That's fine in theory, but if you're in a disaster big enough that both your home and place of work are simultaneously destroyed I doubt you'll be sweating your video files...

Re:3TB

[kvezach]

Hey, it's a redundant array. What did you expect?

Re:3TB

[biryokumaru]

Haha, that's exactly what I was thinking about!

Re:3TB

[Compaqt]

Thanks for the writeup.

How do you manage user permissions from Windows if the Nexenta server itself is wide open?

And can you install /boot or / to a flash device?

Re:3TB

[gravis777]

I could be the smartass, and state that Dual Density 5 1/4" discs could store about 1.2 meg, and single density 3.5s only stored 720k. Wasn't the C64 only able to store about 180k per side of a 5 1/4"?

Truthfully, all my drives under 300 gig have gone physically bad years ago. Its probably been about 8 years or longer since I had a 20 gig drive, and 4 years since I had a 40, and that was in a laptop. My 1TB drive has been my fastest and least problamatic of all my drives, but that is probably been because its the newest. In my experience, hard drives start slowing down around 2 years of age, start having dirty sectors around 3 years of age, and fail completely between 3-5 years of age. As such, I am constantly changing out / adding drives. Having multiple drives at different ages, with backups of important files on multiple drives, has kept data to a minimal.

A 3 TB drive at this time would, in a year, have 2 gigs copied from other drives in my system that are probably going to fail.

Re:3TB

[hoggoth]

The server isn't wide open. You use standard Unix permission control for everything outside of the share. You start the share with wide open ACLs when you install, but then from a windows machine you use Windows Security controls from Windows Explorer to set whatever ACLs and permissions you want on the files and folders in the share. It supports full Posix ACLs, which are mostly compatible with NTFS ACLs. The slight differences won't come into play if you just manage permissions from only Windows.

Re:3TB

[Compaqt]

Oh, you mean that you can use a Windows server to control the perms on the CIFS file server, and it just automagically works? Sounds great.

I'll have to look into that, because I much prefer having CD's and DVD's on a hard disk as opposed to optical discs.

Re:3TB

[toddestan]

Raid 1+0 and similar schemes is basically an array made up of arrays of disks. So can have a RAID array if you really wanted to.

Good news

[zrbyte]

This means that soon the 1 and 2 TB drives will be cheaper. I was waiting for this to upgrade my external storage.

Re:Good news

[zrbyte]

Not that I don't like being modded up, but come on guys, this is not Insightful. It's +5 Obvious :)

Re:Good news

[demonbug]

Meh. I got a 1.5 TB about two months ago for ~$75; I don't think we're really going to see the prices drop a whole lot at the "low end", they are already pretty much bottomed out. As others have mentioned, drives have mostly been stuck at the 2 TB point for a while as none of the manufacturers wanted to deal with the controller/MBR/OS issues associated with going bigger, so prices have already had a chance to drop and stabilize. They might come down to $60 in a year or two, but that's probably about it.

Re:Good news

[Anonymous Coward]

Just ordered a 2TB external HDD for $129.99 at Best Buy, I haven't seen them that low in my area ever. Might be some truth to what you're saying, mate!

Re:Good news

[tlhIngan]

Hopefully that'll drop the prices on PATA drives, which seem to have all but disappeared except for WD ones.

I have a NAS box which uses 4 160GB PATA drives. I'm looking to replace them with 4 500GB PATA drives (it doesn't have SATA). The cheapest place I found them was Best Buy, for $90 (Canadian) each. The only place that had them possibly cheaper was Newegg, and I'd only save $5/drive, but lose out in that they were OEM drives and Newegg's bubblewrapped cluster of drives packaging means I might as well have them shipped back to manufacturer as RMA (where they will be promptly returned as "insufficient packaging").

I considered getting a new box, but that means having to either buy a new similar box ($600+ with 4 drives) or a 4-bay empty NAS box ($200+ plus drives). Plus another box to manage and maintain backups for. These NAS boxes run Linux inside, so should they ever go tits up, I can rig up a bunch of USB adapters to mount them.

Things are bad when it's BEST BUY of all places that has it cheapest.

I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[rmadmin]

It appears Seagate beat them. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148580&cm_re=3tb-_-22-148-580-_-Product

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[Anonymous Coward]

WD has an external 3TB drive as well. AFAIK, this is the first one for actually sticking inside a computer.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[danlip]

Given that Seagate doesn't advertise any internal drives at higher than 2 TB, I am guessing that is 2 drives in a RAID0 configuration. Which is a really bad idea - if either drive fails you loose everything, so you have double the failure rate.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[qoncept]

Turns out Newegg isn't such a reliable source. Better try wikipedia.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[valhallaprime]

There's 2 x 1.5TB drives in that.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[schnikies79]

No it's a single drive. You can't buy the naked 3gb drive from seagate, but you can buy it already installed in various devices.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[valhallaprime]

Whoops, noticed they changed it. My bad. Last one I got was a tad larger form factor and had 2 x 1.5s in there.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's this one it has 5 platters. WD has 4 of the 750GB platters that proved reliable in the WD20EARS-00M* disks. I have one of those and so far I'm happy with it (only that it's already chock-full, as always). WD announced the 3TB disk in an external case two weeks ago and it's already selling for $200 so the internal version will likely get cheaper very soon.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they sell it naked? (Just curious.)

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[Anonymous Coward]

FAIL.

There's only ONE drive in that enclosure, and by measurement (6.22" x 4.88" x 1.73") only ROOM for one drive in that enclosure, and the blurb in several ways STATES there is only one drive.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[Smauler]

RAID-0 doesn't quite double your chance of failure (with 2 disks). If you've got a 10% chance of 1 disk failing in a year, you've got a 19% chance of a 2 disk raid0 failing. If you run a 10 disk stripe (mad, mad I tell you), you've got about a 65% chance of it failing. This is all assuming that all hard drive batches are equal. There's some evidence showing that if you but multiple disks from the same place at the same time, they'll probably last about as long as each other.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[bigrockpeltr]

because its fatter than the other slimlined barracudas

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[danlip]

But you have to add in the chances of the RAID controller failing (but that is unknown) in addition to the chances of the individual disks failing. I had it happen.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[markass530]

Judging by the fact the 1st review is from a verified owner and it says "First ever 3TB 3.5" single drive. 7200 RPM to boot. Over 150MB/s sequential read and write speeds using SATA interface. It's half as fast as an SSD for about 1/20th the price." I'm thinking its a single drive

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[0111 1110]

Because the external drive only has a 2 year warranty and because they are able to include hardware to try to minimize the many compatibility issues in breaking the 2TB barrier. Seagate is still expected to release their own (7200 rpm) 3TB internal drive by Christmas. Now that WD has announced there will be more pressure for Seagate to announce their version as well.

Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first.

[Anonymous Coward]

It has TWO (2) Hard Disks in Raid0. Take Seagates fantastically high failure rate and double it. I hope you don't store anything worth anything on that disaster waiting to happen. That is not to mention that it is External ONLY and more expensive per GB than the WD TRUE 3TB drive.

Too bad it's WD

[linear a]

Too bad it's WD - hope these don't have the huge failure rate (2 of 19) that our last bunches have been having.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing is, that was a good batch. :/

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Urza9814]

I have had a 100% failure rate with WD drives. I've only ever had two, but both were dead in under a year. Haven't bought one since. Never had a hard drive of any other brand fail. Hell, I've got drives from '95 that are still running fine, but the WDs can't make it 10 months!

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Low Ranked Craig]

Anecdotal. Hard drives have high failure and DOA rates compared to the rest of the stuff that makes a computer. I've had the same experience with Segate drives. The only solution is to not use hard drives. Of the major manufacturers they all have about the same failure rates.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[indros]

I've had the similar experiences. Mine usually make it to just a month outside the warranty period. One had the distinct honor of only lasting 3 weeks. I was able to recover most of the data, but after that incident, like you, I've only bought non-WD drives. I've had 5 WD drives die. All my other drives have outlived the WD drives by a long shot.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[BassMan449]

The problem with hard drives is it's all dumb luck. I've had the exact opposite experience. I have almost a dozen WD that have been running great for as long a 4 years, but I have one Seagate that died in 2 months.

Mechanical hard drives have very random failure rates and you just have to pick a company with good customer service.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[anUnhandledException]

Not much confidence in a sample size of 2. Buy 20,000 drives and let us know.

For the record I have owned 5 WD over the years (2 currently) and none have died.

Still our combined sample size of 7 isn't really meaningful.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I've had 0% failure rate with WD. Maxtor, Seagate, everyone else, they all died, but my WD never do.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Maltheus]

There are no reliable drives. Every new drive I get goes through a conditioning stage as a redundant backup drive before I'll trust it with real data. And even then, it's data that's backed up to multiple drives. A certain percentage of any brand will fail and that percentage has been climbing for me in recent years. It's taught me to be more rigorous in my backups. I'm not sure how non-techies manage it though.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Smauler]

This is exactly what I tell anyone whenever they start talking, or asking, about HD failure rates. Apart from some obvious exceptions (IBM deathstar, I'm looking at you), HD manufacturors are much of a muchness. You get people swearing blind that one company had never failed them, while others swore blind that the same company produces garbage. I've always kind of had a soft spot for Maxtor, because it's hard to get over your own personal experiences, but I'm running 1 Maxtor, 2 WD, and 1 Seagate in my system now, so I can't have been that attached.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[chocolatetrumpet]

I recently picked up a 2TB WD Black drive with a 5 year warranty. DoA. RMA. DoA again.

Decided to try my luck with Seagate F4 2TB. Received two drives hoping at least one would work. Both passed extended tests.

If you look at the number of "1 egg" ratings on newegg, especially skewed for the past 6 months or so, it seems to me that WD is having quality control issues. But yes, it could just be completely random.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[chocolatetrumpet]

err, not Seagate; rather, Samsung F4

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Kjella]

Yep. Google released a bunch of data on hard disk reliability, not broken down by manufacturer but they said it didn't make much difference. And you know big OEMs like Dell keep track of warrany HDD failures and the "That #%*&%/# Dell ate my documents" hit to their reputation as opposed to other hardware that just breaks means they'd get rid of any poor manufacturers quickly, even if they were slightly cheaper. Also people that deliver big storage solutions and such. Of course you could end up with a lemon model but you wouldn't really know that until late in the game when its reliability numbers really diverge.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently bought a Seagate expansion drive - 2TB, 7200RPM, external, USB.

After 1 day it started making horrible clicking noises.

After consulting the Internet, figured that the problem was the cheap USB casing. Since I had already copied my 1TB drive onto the 2TB drive and given away the 1TB drive, I was kind of stuck. So I went out and bought a better USB casing and now everything works great.

Lesson: your problem could be due to the USB casing rather than the drive.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Dr_Barnowl]

I've had the same experience with cheap bus-powered 2.5" USB controllers ; something in them wears out. They were all the same chipset but you can't tell when you buy them. At first they would start to get unreliable, then they would just die.

The icing on the cake was when I then suffered a mechanical failure in the 500GB drive I was using. I changed to a more expensive caddy, and also switched to a 64GB SSD. The SSD is blisteringly fast, even over a USB 2.0 bus, and despite costing over 8 times as much per GB as a spinning disk, I don't have to worry about the physical abuse it receives to the same degree.

I'm sure the drive controller will have better longevity too because it doesn't draw as much current.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Compaqt]

That sounds just about right. The reason to buy WD, for me, is that their green series runs so cool. It's cool to the touch, while a Seagate next to it is hot.

The only problem I've encountered is it takes a long time (30 seconds) to create a new directory on it (in Ubuntu Lucid), if I haven't created a new folder in the last 5 min or so. Anybody have a clue about that?

Re:Too bad it's WD

[Neil Boekend]

A couple of years back I burned my fingers on a quite new WD 160GB drive (I had a nice blister...) in 2005. After that I decided to place a cooling fan in front of it. I wouldn't have expected the drive to last for years after that incident, but it did. I replaced it last summer for a Green 1TB due to size. A disk surviving this abuse made me a WD fan, although I have read the Google paper on harddisks.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[gravis777]

I don't know, I think Hitachi has always made crappy drives. :-) I just bought two drives over the years (the second to give them a second chance), and on both models,the ball bearings just locked up after about a year of use, with absolutely no warning. Then again, I could have just ahd a bad experience, but Hitachi seems to really be slammed with bad reviews.

I tend to stay Western Digital , partly because of brand, but partly because they are the drives that always seem to be put on huge sales. I got like three Western Digitals, a Seagate, two Maxtors, and then I think I have a Toshiba and a Samsung. Pretty much, put important files on multiple drives by different manufactorors of different ages - don't put all your eggs in one basket. Works quite well for me.

Re:Too bad it's WD

[toddestan]

Well, the Google study only mentions that it had drives from "many" manufacturers. Note they they did not say "All". I can only guess that by 2001 Google had learned their lesson about using WD drives and stopped buying them :)

Time Capsule?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone stuck one of these into a Time Capsule yet? I assume it won't have any problem utilizing all 3TB

Re:Time Capsule?

[Macrat]

Anyone stuck one of these into a Time Capsule yet? I assume it won't have any problem utilizing all 3TB

You don't really have to put it IN a Time Capsule. You can just have the drive in a USB enclosure and attach it to the USB port on the Time Capsule.

You can also attach a drive to the Airport Extreme base station and it will be available over the network for Time Machine backups.

Re:Time Capsule?

[jedidiah]

USB is slower than GigE. By putting your storage behind a USB controller you just killed your performance.

Although the Time Capsule might have had crap performance anyways.

Re:Time Capsule?

[Macrat]

Most people who buy a Time Capsule are getting it for the wifi backups anyway.

Re:Time Capsule?

[jedidiah]

...again with the "Apple is catering to total n00bs" so they shouldn't bother with the finer details "rationale".

Plenty of people with the means and interest in demonstrating their
affluence by conspicously consuming Apple products simply don't
have to bother with WiFi.

WiFi is so ghetto.

Why the space?

[Lord Bitman]

Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?

Re:Why the space?

[psm321]

make 150 copies of it and take the majority vote amongst the copies when reading? :) (j/k)

Re:Why the space?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're going for funny, but that's not a bad idea. We need a file system driver that does this.

Re:Why the space?

[Tumbleweed]

Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?

That would be an SSD, which fails on write, thus keeping any original data around. Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable. As long as you don't fuck it up with a bad firmware update, of course. :)

Re:Why the space?

[TheThiefMaster]

Define the drive as 20 partitions and raid-1 them all together.

Re:Why the space?

[nine-times]

Well, larger hard drives means greater density of storage in the server room, which in turn means cheaper online storage. Have you considered making backups?

Re:Why the space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get yourself a Dropbox subscription.

Re:Why the space?

[jones_supa]

Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable.

How can that be possible? Wouldn't that conflict with the partition table or confuse the file system?

Re:Why the space?

[Tumbleweed]

How can that be possible? Wouldn't that conflict with the partition table or confuse the file system?

My knowledge on this is fuzzy, but I believe the SSD will report those blocks as unwritable. I don't know if it copies that data over to another block or what, but that's the end result - less available space over time, but no actual data loss. The newest generation of SSDs that were just announced have, at least from Intel, I think doubled the number of writes, so it's already got a much longer life than you're going to ever likely use in the field before upgrading the thing anyway.

The new generation of flash is being made on a die shrunk process, so they'll be able to get the price/GB down as well. They're already more than affordable enough for a sweet boot drive for most people.

Re:Why the space?

[Kjella]

Either the moderation is a "insightful for funny" mod or it's on crack. Only one 3.2 GB or so drive I had many yeats ago has failed in that way, all the others have gone completely bye-bye which means all 20 partitions go down at once. It's not redundant when the same failure will knock out all of them...

Re:Why the space?

[Guppy]

That would be an SSD, which fails on write, thus keeping any original data around. Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable.

In theory, that's what's supposed to happen on the cell-level. In practice, companies are often not so considerate in making things fail gracefully. Often the whole drive just bricks itself.

Re:Why the space?

[Kjella]

My Vertex SSD started getting all crazy on Sunday, SMART reported I had average of 4700 writes/cell and a max of almost 15000 and the bad blocks full flag was set. My firmware says its rated for 10000 writes/cell but in the last firmwares OCZ has set it down to 5000/cell. It was not failing gracefully at all. Things just got crazier and crazier with fsck reporting more and more corruption.

It's 1.5 years old and I admit I've been using it heavily with OS and all sorts of torrents and freenet and whatnot and pushed 90% full most of the time, but I've not intentionally been trying to burn it out and it was mounted with relatime not atime. Still, it's more than possible and I suspect even with what I'd consider "normal" use it'd be dead within 5 years. The speed is seductive but that also makes you burn through more GBs because you don't notice them so much and no, they last far from infinitely long.

Re:Why the space?

[Tumbleweed]

It's 1.5 years old and I admit I've been using it heavily with OS and all sorts of torrents and freenet and whatnot and pushed 90% full most of the time

Torrents?! Yo. Boot drive only!

Re:Why the space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear god... the thrashing... THE THRASHING...

Re:Why the space?

[swilly]

Drives do this all the time. Think of it like labeling a sector as bad during an fsck or chkdsk.

Re:Why the space?

[chocolatetrumpet]

Samsung has a 320gig single platter single arm drive called F4. One might hope the mechanical simplicity results in extended life...

Re:Why the space?

[Kjella]

Well, apparently the torrent software has had some issues with torrenting directly to my file server (mapped cifs directory) or when I've had to shut it down. For many smaller things of 1-2 GB it's been easier to just downloading it to the SSD and copy it in batches. I know, it's part of the "not ideal" stuff but well I *could* and the computer didn't have any of the stuttering and slowness you get if you do that to a regular HDD. Still, it's definitively one of the things I'd do differently to cut down on writes next time.

Re:Why the space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you Windows users really reboot that often?

Re:Why the space?

[Tumbleweed]

Do you Windows users really reboot that often?

I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion, but I tend to reboot my home and work Windows boxes on a multi-week basis, almost always because some update forces a reboot.

I mentioned 'boot drive only' as the best use of an SSD, not for regular use (like with torrents).

Re:Why the space?

[Anonymous Coward]

To that end, you might want to use an odd number of copies instead.

Re:Why the space?

[darkshadow88]

Unfortunately, there's no "-1 Really Bad Idea" mod

Re:Why the space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?

That would be an SSD, which fails on write, thus keeping any original data around. Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable. As long as you don't fuck it up with a bad firmware update, of course. :)

Actually it'd be a pair of SSDs that were mirrored with ZFS.

If there's bit rot at some point in the future when you try to read it, ZFS (or btrfs?) will detect it via checksums, and read the block from the other half of the mirror. It will then write the area of the file on the bad side so you have two good copies again.

Re:Why the space?

[gravis777]

Why the space? You obviously do not mess with HD Video, Camera Raw, Premiere projects, or large Photoshop projects. 20 GB wouldn't even hold all my videos from my last vacation - that took two Blu-Ray discs to backup

Re:Why the space?

[psm321]

To counter your anecdote with another anecdote, the vast majority of my drive failures have been of the "some sectors unreadable, you can get to most if you try hard enough [multiple attempts]" variety

Re:Why the space?

[toddestan]

In theory yes. In practice file systems don't know how to deal with media that is part read-write and part read-only, especially if a file ends up with blocks on both. And you have drive controllers that don't verify the writes so you don't know there is an issue until you try and read back the data and get something you didn't expect. And then you have controllers that for whatever reason don't recognize when blocks have failed and won't mark them as unusable. Thanks to the wear-leveling mechanisms the location of these bad blocks move around randomly so you can't even mark them as bad in the filesystem and move on. Once an SSD has started to go bad it's pretty much useless at that point.

Re:Why the space?

[Lord Bitman]

Most of my failures have been "many sectors unreadable, some not unreadable". Yes, I /would/ much prefer a drive which consisted of many independent blocks, which could be plugged in separately (or at least exchanged with components of a new drive), all fitting into the space of an ordinary hard drive....
but that isn't for sale yet, while this is.

whats that smell?? SYSTEM FAILURE

[duck_run]

I'm getting the vibe that these things are gonna fail after about 2 weeks because of something melting or catching fire....... ~if you cant fix it with a hammer get a bigger one~

Runaway memory

[digitaldc]

"This solution is reportedly just temporary until the rest of the industry catches up."
But by then, they will have a Petabyte drive and they will have to catch up to that too.

Re:Runaway memory

[guruevi]

Or you just start using 128-bit addressing. You'll be good until you reach ZettaBytes.

Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other members of the Green line have an "Intellitpark" feature that can destroy the drive in a matter of months for certain workloads (like using linux). Any word on if WD has fixed that for these?

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=73573

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2008/4/10/1396844

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[Anonymous Coward]

no, drives just fail in a month or two, nowadays.
It's just how it is.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[0123456]

Other members of the Green line have an "Intellitpark" feature that can destroy the drive in a matter of months for certain workloads (like using linux).

I've been running 'Green' WD drives in my MythTV server for years with no problems. The oldest has well over 10,000 hours of run time.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[anUnhandledException]

Do you REALLY need to write to the disc 2x a minute every single minute continually for the life of the machine.

Most likely the answer is no. For 99.9% of the people thee is no benefit to writing to the disc continually every 30 seconds as opposed to once a minute or less.

For the 0.01% of people who absolutely must continually write to the disc all the time WD makes a drive series for that. Black series.

Problem solved. Why should WD "fix" the green series drives (optimized for low power consumption) by making them park less thus increasing consumption for a "feature" (to accommodate poorly written software) used by 1% of the population.

Buy the right tool. If you need to write to the disc multiple times per second continually (instead of buffering) for the life of the drive then buy a drive designed to do that.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[Anonymous Coward]

And in fact, no need to. Just use hdparm to disable Intellipark. Problem solved!

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[adolf]

I've had a 1TB "green" WD drive spinning in a Linux-based file-serverish box at home for 3 years.

It works fine, producing never a bad bit, a hiccup, nor any other errant thing.

I've never done any special tweaking with hdparm, or anything else on that drive, since it seemed quite happy by default.

YMMV.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[victim]

So? What is your Load_Cycle_Count? That is what is being discussed here. The drives are rated for 300,000. I have ones near a million that haven't failed yet, but have also failures around 600,000.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[victim]

I will respond to your dickish tone with my own:

Ever here of a log file?

How about if you are monitoring the S.M.A.R.T. data to watch for signs of drive failure? You will destroy the drive instead. (Especially if using Munin, because it doesn't show Load_Cycle_Count by default so you won't see it take off.)

How about when your OS is clever and tries to reduce disk use by only flushing the OS block cache intermittently, and that interval is slightly greater than the park timer? Your machine under continuous use parks and unparks continuously.

So there is this little computer in the drive making park decisions. Shouldn't it notice that the drive is parking too often? WD knows how many parks it built the drive to survive, it knows how frequently it is parking. Cap the park rate! Problem solved.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[anUnhandledException]

Why does a log need to write to a disc more than once per minute. Really?

For 99.9% of uses there is no reason.

There is no reason the log can't simply cache the results to memory and write to the disc once every minute or every couple minutes.

How about when your OS is clever and tries to reduce disk use by only flushing the OS block cache intermittently, and that interval is slightly greater than the park timer?

then change the interval. If the clever OS flushed once per minute it wouldn't be an issue.

The idea that all data needs to be discretely written intermittently with a cycle time of seconds is dubious.

Two options:
a) better software
b) use drive w/ longer park time and accept higher (wasted) energy use.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[victim]

And as soon as everyone is omniscient about the undocumented behavior of their devices and the "documented only in source code" behavior of all code of their systems this will be a brilliant solution.

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[Compaqt]

Thanks for the heads up. Is this maybe a problem only with certain revs?

I've had the WD green 1TB for a year, and the cycle count seems to only be 101:

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 101

The computer is always on, / is on that drive, and I guess that's why it doesn't park (something or another must always be writing to it).

Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two options:
a) better software
b) use drive w/ longer park time and accept higher (wasted) energy use.

a)The software is good enough as is, I think you mean 'software that is aware of this problem', and that means changing everything that ever accesses a disk. The stuff you said about write cacheing is actually why these drives fail - If you were literally writing 24/7, the drive would last longer, but thats a really bad thing to do, so most OS's will cache up writes and do it in bulk over a period of time.. exactly long enough for WD to think the drive should park itself between every write.

b) Thats really where the annoyance comes in. Theres some standard ways to tell a drive how long it should wait for parking and WD doesn't use any of them. There was an official tool from them that required a 32bit ms dos to run to change the setting, but I could never get it to work despite all the different setups I tried.

3TB is old

[ACAx1985]

Seagate did this months ago ($250 for 3TB).

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/external-hard-drive/desktop-hard-drive/

Re:3TB is old

[Anonymous Coward]

That's external. This one's internal.

'yet'?

[CAIMLAS]

Unfortunately, if you're still using Windows XP, don't expect your system to make full use of any 3TB drive (yet).

What do you mean, "yet"? XP Pro was EOL'd in April of last year. It's dead, Jim. There will be no updates or upgrades from that date forward.

Furthermore, there is absolutely 0 (legitimate) reason to be running XP on a machine which will recognize a 3TB drive at the hardware level. None. If you can come up with a reason, there's probably a better way to do it than your proposed approach, long term.

At this point, short of a large uniform environment where there are specific applications to support that only work on XP, running XP is a fool's errand. It's rife with security issues. Sure, keep it around until your older hardware kicks it, but by all means you should be upgrading to something that will actually work with, and be able to utilize, newer hardware.

Re:'yet'?

[hoggoth]

But the real question is does Windows 7-32 bit handle this drive? The summary stated Windows-7 64 bit...

Re:'yet'?

[CAIMLAS]

I suspect not. Why does it matter?

Why would you put a 3TB drive in a 5-year-old+ computer? There haven't been 32bit x86 machines on the market (as 'new product') for several+ years now, and only then on netbooks and laptops. Anything capable of running Windows 7 will, in all likelihood, be using a 64 bit processor.

If you're running 32 bit Windows 7, let me refer you to my previous post where I say "It's dead, Jim." There is no reason to do so unless it is archaic hardware (in which case - does it even have a SATA port?)

Re:'yet'?

[soupforare]

If you're running 32 bit Windows 7, let me refer you to my previous post where I say "It's dead, Jim."

While I agree with you on XP- Cheap desktops, and most (all?) current windows netbooks are running 32-bit Win7. It's not going away any time soon.

Re:'yet'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nitpick: There will still be freely available monthly security updates for XP til 2014.

Re:'yet'?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a bundled HBA to break the 2.19 TB barrier but...

"Product not planned for XP support today" and probably not tomorrow either.

But if you partition it it should be OK on XP I guess?

Re:'yet'?

[hoggoth]

Because there is still software that doesn't run on 64 bit Windows of course.
I use such software daily in my work.

So it's not "dead, Jim."

Re:'yet'?

[canajin56]

I've never heard of anything other than 16 bit software that wouldn't run under Win7 64, but runs fine under Win7 32.

Re:'yet'?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Windows 7-32 can speak smb or nfs, then yes, it handles the drive fine. Just remember to install the drive into the correct box (your Linux file server). ;-)

Re:'yet'?

[Machtyn]

But his point still holds valid. If one wants a 3TB drive for a cheap desktop or any netbooks (which usually only hold a laptop HDD, anyway), then one might want to re-evaluate what they are trying to do.

Re:'yet'?

[EXrider]

I've never heard of anything other than 16 bit software that wouldn't run under Win7 64, but runs fine under Win7 32.

MS GP9, ADP eTime, lots of VB6 and .NET 1.x apps...

Re:'yet'?

[CAIMLAS]

Are you aware that there are a number of good, free virtualization platforms available for you to use? This will allow you to natively run whatever crap it is that won't run on a 64 bit host, and you can actually make use of more than 2GB of memory effectively as a result.

Re:'yet'?

[hoggoth]

Thanks, I'm already aware of that and have tried them all.
My industry's crappy software doesn't run on 64 bit windows and a single job can take 18 hours to run. Under a VM it of course takes longer.

Re:'yet'?

[cusco]

Try working in the physical security field. Until the latest release this year AMAG's access control software wouldn't even work in an Active Directory domain unless you installed it as a freaking DOMAIN ADMIN! Lenel's network video recorder software won't run under 64-bit, and I don't think that Milestone's will either. AMAG won't even install under SQL Server 2008, while Lenel's will but only if it's set for Compatibility Level 90. Open Options doesn't even recognize Windows 7 as a valid operating system, much less Server 2008 (and of course we know that Vista really wasn't).

Keep in mind these are the programs that secure your server room doors.

Re:'yet'?

[RMingin]

Windows 7 32bit does not and likely will not support UEFI or GPT. MS feels these features are Enterprise-only, and All Enterprises Everywhere should be running x64.

MS's thoughts and words, not mine.

Re:'yet'?

[0111 1110]

Furthermore, there is absolutely 0 (legitimate) reason to be running XP on a machine which will recognize a 3TB drive at the hardware level. None. If you can come up with a reason, there's probably a better way to do it than your proposed approach, long term.

In what way is Windows Vista or Windows 7 better than XP? There is no reason to "upgrade". I guess if you are running Windows Vista/7 you probably need a 3TB drive just to contain your ever expanding WinSxS folder. Windows Vista and 7 are the most bloated operating systems the world has ever known. 40 to 60 GB for an operating system partition? Are you kidding me? Even Linux is getting bloated these days, but its not even in the same league as the newer Windows OSes. One particularly nice thing about Linux or OSX or Windows XP is that they will actually fit on an SSD. Good luck with your Windows 7 partition on a 60 gig SSD. I could easily fit 10 normal OSes on the same size disk. The insane bloat of post XP Windows is the main reason why I am planning to phase out my Windows use (except for games) and migrate to a combination of a small, streamlined, Linux distro and OSX (on a hackintosh partition) for apps like Adobe Premiere that don't have a Linux version. Really the only legitimate use for Windows 7 or Vista is for games and most of my favorite games won't even run on Vista or Win7. Eventually games won't be backward compatible with XP and I will have to dual boot Windows 8 and XP to support all of my games.

Re:'yet'?

[toddestan]

You never know. I had a 1.5TB in a AMD Socket A computer for a while - one of the first motherboards that came with SATA. The BIOS reported the drive as having a size of "M" (shouldn't that be MD?), but the OS saw everything properly.

Re:'yet'?

[Tim C]

I can only assume that you've not actually used Windows 7, or at least not for long enough to actually be in a position to form an informed opinion.

I have XP Pro on my PC at work, XP Home on my laptop and Windows 7 Home Premium on my desktop at home, and use a variety of flavours of Windows Server at work (and of course a variety of Linux distributions), and of the Windows versions I far prefer 7.

Where are you getting your "40 to 60GB" figure from? MS quote 20GB for 64bit Windows 7. In any case hard drive space is cheap as chips - I upgraded my home PC 2 years ago and spent around £60 on a 500GB drive. Even assuming 50GB is required, that cost me £6; I often spend more than that on lunch.

The More Things Change

[powerlord]

To provide a solution for this compatibility issue, Western Digital bundles an HBA with the Caviar Green 3TB drive that allows the operating system to use a known driver to correctly support extra large capacity drives. This solution is reportedly just temporary until the rest of the industry catches up

Reminds me of when ATA66/100/133 came out and in order to take advantage of the new larger HDs you needed a new controller. Maxtor kindly bundled one with their drives. Made it very easy to upgrade existing/old machines until enough new motherboard chipsets included support for the updated protocol.

already cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

They're already cheaper...with a high quality 2TB drive costing $109 shipped, and a 1TB drive costing half that!
Were you waiting for the 3TB drives to come out so you could save $20 on your 2TB HD upgrade?

Re:already cheap

[geekprime]

$20 x 6 is $120. x2 (so I have an offline backup) $240.

Not enough to wait for but enough savings to make me decide it's time.

Western Digital

[Dunbal]

At least it's Western Digital, because Seagate drives sure suck lately (looks at the stack of dead Seagate drives).

Re:Western Digital

[Overzeetop]

You missed where Maxtor took over Seagate and kept the Seagate name on the door. I know it was techincally (businessally?) the other way around, but the end result has been Maxtor quality with a Seagate sticker.

Re:Western Digital

[savvysteve]

At least it's Western Digital, because Seagate drives sure suck lately (looks at the stack of dead Seagate drives).

I agree with that!!! I have seen so many dead Seagate drives over the last year that are either DOA or only lasted a few months. I was buying them because of the better warranty they were offering but the hassle is simply not worth it. So I switched back to WD and will only buy them for now on for me and my customers.

Re:Western Digital

[gravis777]

Of course, before that, Seagate bought Connor and did the same thing - Connor quality with Seagate stickers. Took me years before I trusted Seagate again.

Never enough?

[MonoSynth]

5ct/GB is too expensive for you?

Prices don't suddenly drop because of this announcement. I can't believe how they manage to make drives as inexpensive as they are.

Re:Never enough?

[Mashiki]

Actually the drives were announced, and the stores around here dropped about $8 off the 1/1.5TB drives. I picked up a 1TB drive when it was on sale during the usual boxing week sale last year for $97. The same drive is now $54(on sale) and $61 regular, depending on the retailer.

There is never enough drive space

[GoJays]

This isn't really news.

I remember when I had a 100MB hard drive and I thought; "I'll never fill this!". Then I had a 1GB hard drive and thought it would be impossible to fill. Now I have a 1TB drive and I am filling it. There will always be bigger and faster hard drives. One day we will look back at that new massive drive 3TB drive and think; "How did I ever deal with such a finite amount of space?"

Nothing to see here, move along...

New technology... making the 2nd gen stuff cheap..

[savvysteve]

This is great news for misers like me. I like to wait for the new stuff to show up so I can snatch up good deals on the 2nd or even 3rd gen stuff at great prices. Since the 1 TB drives are already getting really cheap, this just means that I might be able to get some 2TB drives even cheaper and get a deal on those 2TB WD Black drives with the 2 read heads that are supposedly great drives with a great warranty and not spend a ton.

It's my density!

[Wowsers]

With ever increasing densities on the platters, doesn't that just mean if there's a malfunction like a HDD head crash, you lose more data?

Re:It's my density!

[dokebi]

With ever increasing densities on the platters, doesn't that just mean if there's a malfunction like a HDD head crash, you lose more data?

Yes, if a full 3TB disk crashes, you definitely lose more data than a full 1GB drive crash. It's call the process of "bigger they are, the harder they fall".

2.19TB limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem. I still have a copy of EZDrive on floppy somewhere.

The problem is that

[geekoid]

old OS can't see the whole thing? That's not really a problem. No more then saying my dos 3.3 can't see 1T.

Not that many people need 3T. yeah yeah, save me your 'people will use the space they have' argument. It doesn't hold up to reality.

\

Re:The problem is that

[0123456]

yeah yeah, save me your 'people will use the space they have' argument. It doesn't hold up to reality.

I thought my netbook's 160GB drive would be plenty, but after six months it was down to 8GB free. I thought my laptop's 640GB drive would be plenty, but it's now down to 40GB free, and only after I deleted a few games from Steam. I thought my MythTV server's 3.5TB would be plenty, but it's down to 400GB free.

Most people will end up using most of the disk space they have available, because it's easier than deleting old files.

Re:The problem is that

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I speak for a lot of people here when I say don't project your tech needs onto me. Thanks.

Re:The problem is that

[ledow]

I manage school networks. I've yet to see a system that didn't use any and all available disk space within the server's / disk's / NAS's lifetime without having to enforce quota.

Bear in mind, then, that we're not talking gigabytes of porn, games, music, etc. and yet it all got filled. When the servers were specced, 500Gb was "enough" for 1000 users (ordinary, inner-city, secondary school). Now they're buying TB hard drives and RAID'ing them together, with many servers offering file storage, but it's still difficult to keep all profiles on a single server.

3Tb is nothing. I have set up systems for *primary* schools where a hot-copy of their server hard drives (for rapid-restore, slow-spool-to-tape/cloud, etc.) just in their current state tops more than 3Tb compressed. They don't do fancy video editing, or huge music recording, just documents, critical school databases (cleansed every September for anything over 4 years old), and their usual programs. Some schools buy networked content servers to save their Internet bandwidth (literally a 250Gb Linux cache with Apache so they access local Flash resources sucked from an online repository overnight), some do video editing or podcasting, etc. And we're still talking about PRIMARY schools here.

3Tb in RAID5 is only 6Tb. That's 6000Gb. In my job, that's about right for the next, say, 4-5 years and then we'll be back to the usual struggle. The average server has several hundred Gb of data today, not counting redundant information, empty space, etc. Run any sort of imaging / thin-client setup, and you're suddenly storing client images too. Have networked programs and you're storing those for everybody too. It's common to have network-setups of everything so that installation is quick and easy (e.g. Office can be installed with keys and pre-set options from a fileshare). Have backups and you often need staging areas for them to be written to (most places I've worked in, I've set it to backup to tape/off-site storage and also to save a copy for a quick local restore). That's before you even get into multiple servers, backing them up to each other (not backing up their backups, of course), things like VMWare snapshots or Ghost images, etc. Hell a decent clipart setup can run to two-figures of Gb. If you're into backing up very expensive course material, teacher training videos, etc. that you have school licenses for, that's 9Gb per DVD.

And a school isn't exactly an "unusual" scenario.

Personally, I've got about 3Tb of storage just in an old Linux machine that holds things I'd rather not delete (programming code, huge downloads, Wine bottles, QEMU images, etc.). It's got 6 drives and about 20-something partitions. I could probably use 3Tb drives in a RAID5 just to upgrade that one machine to something more secure and still not have much space left.

Some people use their computers for access. Some use them to process data and then discard it. Some use them for creation. Some use them for storage. Every single computer I've ever owned has run out of disk space before any other part of it was considered obsolete (and I go back to 20Mb hard drives). Hell, I could do several hundred Gb's just downloading everything I own on Steam into the client, let alone them backing that stuff up into its Steam-created restoration programs. My current laptop is 320Gb, of which about 10 is free and that's because I keep sacrificing games that I haven't played in a while to Steam backups.

3Tb is nothing, and by the time these are affordable (to me, that means under £100), I'll be wanting one in my laptop.

How bout ppc support?

[Windows Breaker G4]

OK so many PCs won't see it but how bout my quad G5? Where does my late firmware top out?

Old-school workaround

[damn_registrars]

Can't we just split it into nice little 540MB partitions like we did back in the day?

Re:Old-school workaround

[jimicus]

This is an issue at the block level, so no.

Re:Old-school workaround

[damn_registrars]

That was actually (a rather lame attempt at) a joke. After all, who would want some two thousand partitions?

Finally ...

[Stooshie]

... somewhere to store my ultra-secure password that I keep forgetting! :-)

Windows 32 is supported but only as non-boot drive

[anUnhandledException]

However that limitation is dubious at this point.

Windows 7 32 & 64 bit is supported (as is Vista 32 & 64)

Boot drive requires
compatible HBA
UEFI (instead of BIOS)
64 bit OS and compatible storage drivers

There are almost no UEFI compatible motherboards so booting from this disc is most systems is impossible.

Both 32 & 64 bit versions of 7 & Vista support this drive as secondary (non boot) drive.

$200 on ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

"Professionaly[sic] Resealed" um, ok... so they probably ripped them out of those MyBooks that are also selling for $200.
DISCLAIMER: I don't know the seller but when you get scammed, blame me. -- A.C.

Re:$200 on ebay

[0111 1110]

It is interesting that the seller is claiming a 7200 rpm spindle speed. If that's true then I don't understand why this would be a Caviar Green. The same seller is also selling an unannounced 3TB Seagate XT internal drive, although he may have just pulled a Goflex drive out of its enclosure for that one.

Silly question

[Mr_Silver]

Existing motherboards utilizing BIOS (non-UEFI), GPT ready operating systems like Windows 7 64-bit, and appropriate storage class drivers, can address the entire capacity of hard drives larger than 2.19TB.

If I stick one of these 3TB monsters into a NAS (as opposed to using the SATA cable directly into the computer), will Windows XP and Windows 7 32-bit be able to access the contents just fine - or will they too be stuck at 2.19TB until the patch is applied?

Re:Silly question

[damnbunni]

There shouldn't be a problem with Windows seeing all the space in a NAS.

However, the NAS itself may well not support the 3TB drive.

But WD sucks

[McTickles]

Seriously, they suck at even the most basic engineering. Their "green" drives are notoriously failure prone, why? because some smart ass at WD thought it would be a good idea to "save" energy by turning the drive on and off constantly... somebody failed HARD in understanding PWM and electromechanics basic concepts.

I can wait

[ATestR]

Face it... I haven't had to buy a new HD recently, so my largest is still only 1TB. And if you think about it, the new 3TB drives are going to be kind of spendy for another 6 month or so. But they will drive down the prices of the 2TB drives. I know what I'll be buying if I need more storage space in the immediate future.

You can all thank me for this drive

[KiwiCanuck]

As, I bought a 2TB WD Green on Saturday. ~:-) Couldn't help myself it was down to $99.99 (memory express).

Single-platter drives.

[Guppy]

In the past, I've always gone with the biggest single-platter drive I can get. Seems to work well as far as reliability goes.

Unfortunately, a lot of manufacturers seemed to have dropped that technical information from their websites. While you can sometimes figure out that various drive models are multiples of some value (indicating capacity of a single platter side), capacities are changing fast enough that it is no longer a reliable indicator -- I could very well being just looking at old stock from a previous density.

Anyone have a good way to tell how many platters/heads a drive has, before buying it?

Linux?

[fearlezz]

I'm sorry, isn't this Slashdot? Why isn't anybody asking about Linux support?
A while ago, I read that Linux wasn't ready for 3TB drives yet. Is it now? Do we need 64bit Linux to use this, or is there a solution like PAE is to the 4GB memory limit?
Is the bundled HBA supported?

I'd love to use this disk to store multiple snapshots (rsnapshot) of my fileserver...

Re:Linux?

[Compaqt]

Yeah, I hear you. Pining for the old days of Beowulf this, Beowulf that.

Sometimes I feel like a minority here running Linux.

Re:Linux?

[0111 1110]

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/28840-so-i-bought-the-new-3tb-goflex-desk/page__p__262945__hl__seagate%203tb%20goflex__fromsearch__1&#entry262945

You definitely need a 64 bit OS to fully see the drive. Well unless you can manage a hack like using larger block sizes. You also need a controller that supports 3TB and also has Linux drivers (not that hard to find).

runs on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not accustomed to the limitations of current Windows releases. Can you tell us whether it will run on our Linux/Ubuntu box?

XP often won't wake up from S3 on 1+GB SATA drives

[D4C5CE]

It's a known issue not only on Windows 7 / Vista http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977178 but also on XP http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317272 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330100 - however the lastest incarnation of the flaw does not seem to get fixed for the older systems such as XP (or has anyone found a solution for this?), and Intel Matrix drivers as a workaround http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/50479-1-tb-wdc-black-fails-wake-sleep.html#6 require (and have their installer check for) one of a few specific boards.

BS about 3T

[bored]

This article makes it sound like having a 3T hard drive doesn't work with anything other than the latest and greatest HW. This is mostly BS, sure there are a number of cases where it doesn't work, or you can't boot off a partition at the end of the device. On the other-hand, having used various RAID devices >2T, some of which were transparent SATA devices (aka 2HD's striped, exported as a single SATA device) for years. I haven't had a major problem since the 2003/4 with them. Back then many of the linux filesystem (ext2/reiser/etc) had performance or data integrity issues with disks that large. Back then switching to XFS or similar was usually the solution. With windows, I can't remember having a problem in a LONG time.

Basically, if you don't plan to boot of the drive, its probably going to work just fine in any machine made in the last 5-7 years. Booting is another issue, but there are workarounds. Same as always, I remember having to have boot managers install in my boot sector to boot off a 512meg disk in the early '90s. Same game now, only there are a number of alternatives, including bootstrapping from USB flash.

Sick of arbitrary disk space limitations

[gstrickler]

Many of these are DOS/Windows specific, but some are BIOS or hardware limitations.

First, there was the 32MiB limitation. Actually, I think there was a 16MiB limit with FAT12, even though it theoretically supported 32 MiB

Next, they allowed up to 4 partitions, so it was 32MiB/volume, 128MiB per drive.

Next, the extended partition, allowing more than 4 volumes.

Next, up to 2GiB per volume, where we remained for a while.

Next, the CHS addressing system limited you to 8GiB, less on some systems

Next, FAT32 allowed up to 32GiB per volume, then 64GiB, then 2TiB.

Next, NTFS allowed up to 16EiB (theoretical), but NT4 wouldn't let you create a boot volume > 4GiB.

Next, the 128GiB/137GB 28-bit LBA limit.

Next, 48-bit LBA allows up to (theoretical) 128TiB (512 byte sectors), or 1PiB (4k sectors)

However, the BIOS and MBR limits you to 2TiB.

EFI has been available and shipping for at least 4 years, but most manufacturers have ignored it. Anyone having fun yet?

2TB in Linux

[Compaqt]

Does it work with Linux? I.e., the chip can't read 2TB, but it only has to read the boot block, and then Linux drivers take over the rest.

Or have /boot on a flash drive.

Re:2TB in Linux

[jandrese]

Last time I tried, I couldn't get any OS to see a large drive attached to one of those chips. Windows 7, Freebsd, Linux, they all failed to see any drive at all on the controller. I had to stick a Promise controller in there to get the drive to work.

From what I've seen, Promise is the only consumer controller company that makes their own chips. Everybody else just slaps a 3112 on a PCI card and calls it a day. Unfortunately, because nobody advertises what chip they're using, you can't find this out until you buy the card and stick it into a machine.

Power cycling hard drives/SMART

[Compaqt]

Do you ever turn your computer off?

I don't. And my drives seem to be (pretty much) fine for the last 6 years (1 year for WD green 1TB).

By the way, palimsest (branded as "Disk Utility" in Ubuntu) is an easy way to get SMART disk failure predictions. There's also GSmartControl, which is more advanced.

Click here to install in Debian/Ubuntu.

How nontechies manage

[Compaqt]

>I'm not sure how non-techies manage it though.

They don't back up. And therefore (to a greater extent) their drives don't fail.

The act of constantly churning through a drive to back it up or rsync it actually causes it to fail.

This is a controversial hypotheses for which I'd love to be able to get/create some scientific data.

Re:How nontechies manage

[Maltheus]

I agree that they don't back stuff up. But I don't think backing up a drive leads to its failure. In my experience, after a break in period, drives never fail on me before I have to upgrade to something bigger. And my drives are on 24/7.

Local Flash cache

[Compaqt]

>Some schools buy networked content servers to save their Internet bandwidth (literally a 250Gb Linux cache with Apache so they access local Flash resources sucked from an online repository overnight),

You wouldn't happen to be referring to caching the Flash-based educational site starfall.com, would you? I had a devil of a time trying to cache that locally, how did you (if you did)?

Re:XP often won't wake up from S3 on 1+GB SATA dri

[Compaqt]

Ubuntu does that too (only on certain boards, though). I've had trouble getting it to wake up on older mboards, leading to the REISUB sequence.

is external drive 3tb possible?

[hesaigo999ca]

I want to know if they will be able to bypass the limitations of windowsxp, if you use it for external purposes only,
as the usb plugged in, may not worry about 2 or 3 or 4 tb, ...just wondering...anyone?