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WD Launches 3 Terabyte HD

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-please dept.

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."

7 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. orly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Into space?

  2. short-sightedness by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:short-sightedness by NevarMore · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Re:The industry can take all the time it needs by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Re:3TB by biryokumaru · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

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  5. Re:3TB by Gnavpot · · Score: 5, Funny

    I like my RAID array

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

  6. Do they self destruct like other Greens? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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