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3TB Hard Drives Square Off Against Everything Else
crookedvulture writes "Last week, Western Digital announced its intention to buy rival drive maker Hitachi. Interestingly, those are the only two companies with 3TB hard drives available for sale. The Tech Report takes a closer look at how the two models compare with each other and over 30 different hard drives and SSDs. The resulting data paints a detailed picture of the storage landscape and is worth skimming for anyone curious about how spindle speeds and flash memory impact performance, power consumption, and noise."
Seagate has had a 3TB drive on the market for -months.- They were the first on the scene, in fact. How'd you miss this? They have a 64MB cache, 7200rpm SATA II / USB 2.0 / 3.0 external drive, with the internal drive version of it with a new, custom firmware to allow for old BIOS installation hitting the shelves at the end of March. You can take it out of the enclosure and use it internally if you really want.
That's not "the only two." That just makes Seagate "the only ones that waited for extra dev time to make it widely compatible for non-techies."
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
lol.. someone tell the super-aspergers at wikipedia they dont need to delete knowledge anymore... we have 3TB harddrives now...
...I forget what is on it all the time. Sometimes I wander across some forgotten directory and it is like discovering a secret treasure trove, but usually it is junk. I'm not prepared to say "We'll never need more than 3TBs of hard drive space," but aside from cyber-hoarders, porn addicts, and legitimate business uses, the supply of hard disk space has clearly exceeded the demand.
From someone whose Hitachi backup drive just saved his bacon when his 4th WDC drive this year failed, I'd say this is bad news.
Maybe its time to buy a shedload of these 3Tb drives before WDC gets their hands on them and they become Deathstars again.
#include <sig.h>
Did they get the alignment between the old 512 byte and new 4096 byte sectors right for the Caviar Green? I know the performance is average, but mine doesn't suck as much as their benchmarks make out. The Caviar Green misreports its structure as 512 byte sectors, in an effort to be windows compatible. To get full performance out of it, you have to be careful to (possibly manually) align the file system so its 4096 byte clusters line up with the drive's 4096 byte sectors. If not, the Caviar green attempts to emulate 512 byte sectors, and has to do multiple accesses for each 4096 byte cluster read/written. On read, it needs to read the first half of the cluster, then the second half (throwing away portions of each sector). It gets worse on write, as the drive will read in a sector, write the part of the cluster that overlaps it, then write it back, then repeat the process for the second portion of the unaligned cluster. Get the alignment right and its one access per cluster, and the drive actually performs pretty well. Next time, WD might make life simpler by ditching the 512 byte sector emulation, and trusting the user's operating system to actually work with 4096 byte sectors.
Oh yeah, turn off the Caviar Green's "auto head parking" "feature" as well, as under Linux the drive parks and unparks its heads about every 8 seconds, as the default "sleep" time for the drive seems to be marginally less than Linux's average time between disk accesses.
Seagate used to be top of the line as far as hard drives were concerned but these past few years have shown a drop in quality. My 1.5 Tb Seagate started acting flakey last summer so I ordered a Hitachi as a replacement while Seagate sent me a refurb drive. We'll see how long the Hitachi lasts.
Back when 80Gb drives first came out I ordered one from Maxtor. Months later it started acting up and they sent me a replacement, which died not long afterward. A few drives later they sent me a brand new retail kit. At this point I knew enough to run the Maxtor diags before even formatting the drives. Well the diags said this drive was also bad. Yes I did run diags on different boxes to rule out a bad motherboard or cable. I decided it wasn't worth the $8 to send back drive number 6 (yes SIX) and bought a Seagate instead which is still in use today.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Actually USB mass storage can support >512 byte sectors easily
E.g.
http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/28840-so-i-bought-the-new-3tb-goflex-desk/
This actually presents a 4096 byte physical sector size to the OS. Handily this means that MBR partitioning will still work with it - that has a limit of 2^32 sectors but with a 4K sector size that is 16TB..
Windows is fine with >512 byte sectors at least post boot but I don't think it's possible to use them over ATA on any current OS. I.e. there are Advanced Format drives with 4K sectors but currently they all emulate 512 byte sectors over ATA. Probably moving to 4K native sector size on ATA is going to take some time since that requires changes to the ATA spec, drives, Bios and OS boot code.
Since the USB mass storage driver has supported >512 byte sectors for ages because CDs and DVD Roms have 2K byte sectors it's actually easier to get >2TB drives working over USB.
The reason I know about this stuff? I wrote this free tool
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm
It so happens that it works fine with the 3tb Goflex USB drive because it has a 4K physical sector size. FAT32 has the same limit 2^32 sector limit as MBR.
So you can have 16TB FAT32 volumes to share your AVI files between your PC, Mac, Linux box and games console/media player. 16TB is a lot of movies, maybe even all of them.
Now some might say that it's insane to use such an old format. That's sort of true but FAT32 is good because it's so widely implemented. It's hard to imagine anything else being supported across such a wide range of devices. Also if all you're doing is streaming AVI files FAT32 is actually good enough - because it is so simple it is trivial to implement it and get stability and performance very close to the raw performance of the device. More modern file systems are not like that.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
> I very well may be incorrect here, but it sounds to me like you're confusing clusters (aka, allocation units) of a file format and physical disk sectors.
No, not at all - I'm talking about physical sector size, not cluster size.
The limit on both FAT32 and MBR is 2^32 physical sectors. FAT32 allows for clusters of 2^n sectors where n is 1 to 7.
> Since historically magnetic disks have always had 512 byte sectors
In the US hard and floppy disks are both 512 bytes. But Japanese PC-98 machines had floppy formats with 1024 byte sectors. And CD and DVDs have always had 2048 byte sectors. So do DVD-RAM disks. Windows supports 512,1024,2048 and 4096 byte sector sizes, and so does the USB mass storage class. ATA doesn't support anything but 512 byte sectors - there's probably a proposal to do so but I don't know of any hard drives that currently implement it. You'd also need Bios and OS boot code changes to make this work. At present Advanced Format drives have 4K sectors internally but emulate 512 byte when talking over ATA.
> I'm not completely sure, but I *think* that you *should* be able to install and boot a 32-bit OS with native Advanced Format and EFI/GPT support (note that that excludes all Windows OSs currently), an Advanced Format drive, and a GPT/EFI setup all with a disk larger than 2TiB.
EFI supports drives with 2^64 sectors. If you want a >2TB drive and MBR partitioning that drive needs to have physical sectors bigger than 512 bytes. E.g. a 3TB drive will have more than 2^32 sectors if they are 512 byte but less if they are 4096 byte.
Unfortunately Windows - at least x86 Windows - can't boot off an UEFI Bios and you need an UEFI Bios to boot off GPT. It's also pretty hard to find commodity x86 motherboards with UEFI (all Itanium boards are EFI and Intel Macs are a sort of bastardised EFI), which is why Microsoft didn't make it work. You can get UEFI boards with x64 though, and this is supported in Vista x64 SP1
All of which presents hard disk manufacturers with a bit of a problem for >2TB drives - they could emulate 512 byte sectors but then they'd need to use GPT which x86 Windows won't boot off. Or they could expose the 4K sectors but ATA and Bioses don't yet support that.
However if they make an USB external drive they can expose 4K sectors to the outside world since USB Mass Storage supports this (it had to because of Japanese floppies and optical disks) and there will be less than 2^32 sectors so MBR partitioning will still work.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Is it just an impression, or has hard drive technology hit some kind of ceiling. Those two 3TB drives have been available for over a year and there's no other identical or bigger model on the horizon. It used to be that you had a 50% increase every 6 months On the one hand I have a hunch that all the 5Tb pre-series and 10Tb prototypes are going to Google data warehouses, on the other hand I think that research budgets now go to SSDs. So what gives ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?