3TB Hard Drive Round Up

MojoKid writes "When 3TB hard drives first arrived compatible motherboards with newer UEFI setup utilities weren't quite ready for prime time. However, with the latest Intel and AMD chipsets hitting the market, UEFI has become commonplace and compatibility with 3TB drives is no longer an issue... A detailed look at four of the latest 3TB drives to hit the market from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital shows ... there are some distinct differences between them. Performance-wise, Seagate's Barracuda XT 3TB drive seems to be the current leader but other, slightly less expensive drives, come close."

Comments

Why the comment on the capacity

[beelsebob]

For every drive they comment that the drives have a 2.72TB capacity reported in windows. Why is this surprising them so much? Everyone knows that Windows misreports TiB as TB. Given that all these drives are advertised as 3TB, and 3TB is equal to 2.728TiB it's hardly surprising the capacity that windows reports, is it?

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Pharmboy]

and since the drives read and write in lock step, odds are remarkably good that the next drive in the array will die before you finish rebuilding the RAID set.

Utter nonsense. If one drive failing caused the next to fail, then millions would not be using RAID as the defacto method of redundancy. I've had many, many RAID setups for many years (ie: every server and workstation for almost 20 years), and had the occasional drive failure. I've never had two drives fail in the same array. Ever. And that was with both hardware and software RAID setups. Drives fail due to manufacturing flaws, even minor ones that don't show up for a long time. You overstate the ability of manufacturers to create multiple products exactly the same. They may be built to the same minimum STANDARD, but that isn't the same as being IDENTICAL.

a good RAID array should contain no more than one of any single drive model by any single manufacturer

Sorry, but this is bullocks and if someone told you this, they were pulling your leg. This guarantees nothing, except that your array will likely perform like crap because they will all have different latency, as well as sustained and burst throughput. This would be most noticeable in a software RAID, and slow the whole system down. The entire purpose of a RAID is to use identical drives in size, performance and specifications so the entire array, regardless of RAID type, will seamlessly act like a single drive, while using the least amount of overhead.

Try a different subject matter, you are seriously missing some information about this one.