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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."
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 . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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
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.
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.
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...
.sig: No such file or directory
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.