Well, they've finally gone and done it, Seagate released a 3tb external drive

[Welsper]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/29/seagate-busts-out-3tb-external-hard-drive-for-250/

Niiice.


Want.

 

[jordan12]

Until these start dying just like their 1.5 and 2 TB drive disasters.

Not to be negative or anything. Laugh

 

[Ryan711]

Why no internal? Is that just 2 1.5TB raided or something?

 

[Welsper]

Until these start dying just like their 1.5 and 2 TB drive disasters.

Not to be negative or anything. Laugh

*snrk*

lol

Why no internal? Is that just 2 1.5TB raided or something?

From what I've read, it's a single drive.

 

[drescherjm]

Why no internal? Is that just 2 1.5TB raided or something?

Probably trying to avoid the non bootable 2TB+ partition issue.

 

[jordan12]

I used to love seagate. No more.

Anyone who actually buys this drive never looked at any of the issues that seagate has had over the last year. Their data will burn in hell for their lack of attention to this.

 

[Welsper]

Probably trying to avoid the non bootable 2TB+ partition issue.

agreed

 

[[LYL]Homer]

And an external drive is probably more profitable for them as a retail package.

 

[lizardking009]

Anyone who actually buys this drive never looked at any of the issues that seagate has had over the last year. Their data will burn in hell for their lack of attention to this.

I have 8 of the 2tb LP drives. They support TLER/CCTL/ERC with smartctl and are fast enough. No failures or problems. I've actually had more issues with the WD20EADS drives.

If I wasn't done with my storage builds for a couple years, it would be tempting to buy a couple and crack them open.

 

[Lateralus]

We'll just have to wait and see, but yeah I would be wary of these drives. Seagates haven't been getting the best reviews lately. I'm sure some people do have good luck with them, but I'm hesitant due to Newegg reviews and the fact that the only drive I've had die in recent memory was a Seagate. All of my WD drives are running fine and I recently picked up 4 of the Samsung 2TB drives which I'm liking a lot so far.

I used to love Seagate too but after they bough Maxtor, reduced their warranty, had the 7200.11 firmware problems, etc. I'm just not very keen on them anymore. I haven't sworn them off forever but I'm fine not using them for now.

 

[Ryan711]

We'll just have to wait and see, but yeah I would be wary of these drives. Seagates haven't been getting the best reviews lately. I'm sure some people do have good luck with them, but I'm hesitant due to Newegg reviews and the fact that the only drive I've had die in recent memory was a Seagate. All of my WD drives are running fine and I recently picked up 4 of the Samsung 2TB drives which I'm liking a lot so far.

I used to love Seagate too but after they bough Maxtor, reduced their warranty, had the 7200.11 firmware problems, etc. I'm just not very keen on them anymore. I haven't sworn them off forever but I'm fine not using them for now.

Also, we have to keep in mind that the vast majority of people that have good experiences won't take the time to write a review, while just the opposite is true for those that have drives fail on them.

 

[Lateralus]

Also, we have to keep in mind that the vast majority of people that have good experiences won't take the time to write a review, while just the opposite is true for those that have drives fail on them.

Right, and in addition to there being more people taking the time to write poor reviews for Seagate drives there appear to be more people writing good reviews about other brands also.

 

[drescherjm]

At work where I have hundreds of drives and dozens of Seagate 7200.11 drives. The 7200.11 drives have had a much higher failure rate than all other drives we have. This week we sent back the 4th RMA of the year when I get that back I may have to send the 5th as one drive in a raid 5 has begun to add reallocated sectors almost daily. The one we RMA'd this week had a SMART status of PASSED but would error out and add 20 to several hundred reallocated sectors per day. And I mean per day. In two weeks it went from 20 reallocated sectors to 2000+. It was in a fully backed up raid5 with a spare so no real danger. With that said even my dozens is not a good statistical sample size..

 

[Gomar]

I just cant imagine with what any home user would fill up a 3tb HDD with!
music? games? videos?
A 250gb hdd for me is big enough... too much even.
Anyone wanting above a 500gb drive must realize that you need another one to back it up, otherwise, if it crashes you lose all your stuff. Why keep all your eggs in one basket?

BTW, yes, 10mb in 1975 was a fantasy('The Thomas Crowne Affair'), and now it's a joke. But just because I could buy a 12cylinder $55k Jaguar doesnt mean I should. I could get by with a $15k Mazda.

 

[drescherjm]

If your machine is a HTPC than its very easy to fill your drive. At home I have over 4TB allocated on 7 hard drives (no raid or backup of the video). And that is mostly SD video and not even HD. I am thinking of adding a second 2TB WDC green for less than $120 or wait till the WDC black drives hit that price point and replace most of the smaller /slower drives with that. If I wait long enough it will have 600GB or better platters and thus higher performance.

 

[wbo]

Another use for this is storage of video captured from live events in the field. Professional capture devices like the nanoFlash capture video at 100 - 280 MBps to compact flash cards and it is not uncommon for the video files from a single event to total over 2 TB. Standard procedure is to swap the cards during the event and offload the video from the cards to external hard drives to minimize the number of cards needed (64 GB or 128 GB cards capable of writing data at 280 MBps sustained are very expensive).

A couple of these drives in an external enclosure configured as a RAID 1 (for redundancy) for use in the field would be very useful.

 

[FireWire2]

Why no internal? Is that just 2 1.5TB raided or something?

Smart move! If Seagate release 3.0TB as internal... The company will be bankrupt due to the return of HDD. It is not the HDD but the SATA controller, there is TOO many SATA port can not see over 2.0TB (16bit addressing).

Remember the 128GB problem several years ago? Yeap same thing, but this time is 2.0TB limitation

 

[drescherjm]

I remember the 32MB limit..

 

[gojirasan]

Smart move! If Seagate release 3.0TB as internal... The company will be bankrupt due to the return of HDD. It is not the HDD but the SATA controller, there is TOO many SATA port can not see over 2.0TB (16bit addressing).

Actually it *is* a single 3TB drive. Since Seagate isn't known to have 5 platter tech, it probably means 750 gig platters. And I don't think that is correct about the SATA controllers. I haven't heard that. And 16 bits seems unlikely. 32 bits gives you the 2TB limit. Not 16 bits. Of course the MBR partition table format only supports 32 bit addressing. A GUID partition table is necessary. And most current (non-server) motherboards do not support booting to a GPT. A UEFI motherboard is necessary for that. MSI has announced support for EFI by the end of the year, but I haven't heard anything about it from the other manufacturers. I think this release caught everyone off guard. People weren't expecting these drives until Christmas. Oh and obviously you will need a 64 bit OS. Windows XP x64 will work, but the drive won't be bootable. In Windows 7 (and Vista) GPT partitioned drives will be bootable as soon as some EFI motherboards are released.

 

[Tophmeister]

I just hope other companies come out with this size (or bigger) drive. Like many of you, I don't trust Seagate.

 

[Darakian]

If you want a 3TB internal, just buy one of these and bust it open

 

[requiem99]

I used to love seagate. No more.

Anyone who actually buys this drive never looked at any of the issues that seagate has had over the last year. Their data will burn in hell for their lack of attention to this.

Quoted, and repeated verbatim, for truth.

 

[gojirasan]

Windows XP x64 is an interesting case because it does have backward compatibility with more than 90% of apps written for XP x86 (and some windows 2000 apps as well) due to its 32 bit compatibility mode. A dual boot XP x64 and Windows 7 system will be interesting. That is exactly what I plan to have. But EFI is going to be introduced on motherboards by the end of the year. This will allow for bootable GPT partitions, but only for Windows 7. The EFI standard only allows booting to GPT partitions. So if you have an EFI motherboard (short of some custom monkeying by the motherboard manufacturers) you will *only* be able to boot into Windows 7 or Vista with that motherboard since those are the only (Windows) OSes that support GPT booting.

Since I am not willing to just toss out all of my Windows XP apps and games that means I cannot buy an EFI only motherboard. Of course a motherboard with support for both the current BIOS and EFI would be nice but I'm not sure it's possible. Maybe with some kind of hardware switch to physically switch between 2 different chips.

So what to do if you want to dual boot XP x64 and Win7 and still be able to use nearly all of your older apps?
1. Avoid EFI motherbaords.
2. Have at least one old fashioned 2 TB or less MBR partitioned disk to serve as a a boot/system disk. An SSD, Velociraptor 450/600, Caviar Black 2TB, or Samsung F3 7200 RPM 1 TB would all make good choices for this. And hopefully prices will drop on 2 TB drives as 3 TB drives are released.
3. Partition and manage (defragment etc) your GPT drives in Windows 7 since Windows XP x64 utilities will not work for GPT drives.