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: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.)

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: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 . . .

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.

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

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?

[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?

[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: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: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.

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: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: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: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

[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: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.

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...