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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."
Into space?
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.)
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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
This means that soon the 1 and 2 TB drives will be cheaper. I was waiting for this to upgrade my external storage.
It appears Seagate beat them. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148580&cm_re=3tb-_-22-148-580-_-Product
Can all fish swim?
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
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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."
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I like my RAID array
Not as much as I like my redundant RAID array of inexpensive disks.
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
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.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.
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.
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.
America, Home of the Brave.
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."
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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.
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 ;)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
you never had a girlfriend did you?
People, what a bunch of bastards
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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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 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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is an issue at the block level, so no.
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
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.
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.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false