Seagate Barracuda 7200.11: 1.5TB of love

You know, we're not actually certain we want to trust 1.5TB of our precious precious NES ROMS invaluable work data to a single drive, but that doesn't mean Seagate's latest Barracuda isn't droolworthy regardless. The jump from 1TB to 1.5TB is the "largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives," according to Seagate, and the perpendicular-recording drives should begin shipping in August. There are also a pair of Momentus 2.5-inch 500GB notebook drives coming in Q4 in 5400 and 7200RPM speeds, but like big brother, pricing is unavailable -- we've got a hunch you might want to start saving those pennies, though.

[Thanks, Dave]

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:15PM]

Actually, manufacturers do include the "visible space" on their packaging (albeit in fine print) and most also explain how an OS calculations are different than those that HDD manufacturers use.

[Tarvus Domicus Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:21PM]

That's not even 1.4 TB! THE HORROR!!!!!

That means I at least get to keep a few things.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:18PM]

Calm down, chief. There's no false advertising here. 1.5TB is really the capacity of the physical drive. There's no conspiracy to keep you from your precious disk space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_Overhead

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:25PM]

GB GiB because 1024 1000. This topic gets beaten to death with every new hard drive release. Can we please let it rest once and for all? Pretty please?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:26PM]

Since there's no editing function, let me fix my previous comment:

GB != GiB because 1024 != 1000. This topic gets beaten to death with every new hard drive release. Can we please let it rest once and for all? Pretty please?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 7:14PM]

Ugh, yet another person who doesn't understand numerical bases. HDD uses the SI definition of giga- (1000^3, base-10), which other memory is base-2 (SI definition is gibi-, 1024^3).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte#Consumer_confusion

[acabtp Posted Jul 11th 2008 1:20AM]

noob

[Wwhat Posted Jul 11th 2008 7:47AM]

Isn't the issue that they should put 'formatted capacity' on it, and that lots of space is lost to the filesystem itself, discuss. ;)
Oh and let's not forget that they put things like '16MB cache' on these HD's, but is it really 16MB?
Incidentally, I do think they should use the binary definitions on HD's since you don't use them for analog data do you?

[Phys1c5 Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:06PM]

I can't wait to format this drive with ReiserFS! (although, I should make backups; I don't want a corrupt filesystem to cause a bloody mess...)

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:19PM]

*rimshot*

[Phys1c5 Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:07PM]

I can't wait to format this drive with ReiserFS! (although, I should make backups; I don't want a corrupt filesystem to cause a bloody mess...)

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:27PM]

Ouch, it was bad enough the first time...

[Wwhat Posted Jul 11th 2008 7:51AM]

Blame engadget™.com™ for not processing comments fast enough, or alternatively giving people feedback it's being processed.

[Boyo Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:12PM]

i'm holding out for the 500TB Drive. I got so burned 10 years ago with my 1.5GB drive.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:38PM]

1024 mb = 1GB
1000 mb ≠ 1GB

1.5 "TB" will probably be around 1.45 TB Formated ~1,464,843.75 mb

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 1:21AM]

your first part is only true in Windows (and Mac? idk).
with the IEC system, it's the other way around:
1024 MB ≠ 1 GB
1000 MB = 1 GB
...and...
1024 MB = 1 GiB.

outside the IEC system, the following can be true:
1024 MB = 1 GB
1000 MB = 1 GB
and thats the raison d'être of the IEC system, of which 'GiB' is a part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#IEC_standard_prefixes

read the links a couple of people posted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_Overhead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte#Consumer_confusion

your second part is a bit off too. if you divide 1.5 TB down to bytes by using "1000" between each level (TB/GB/MB/KB/B), then multiply back up to TiB using 1024 between each level, you get: 1.36 TiB / 1396.98 GiB / 1,430,511.5 MiB.

[Wwhat Posted Jul 11th 2008 8:00AM]

For some reason I think this new trend of putting the lowercase i in is annoying and somehow pretentious, but I had that before with things the IEC introduced, their symbols and conventions although practical seem somehow to radiate something unpleasant, like the square shapes for logic gates rather than the traditional old system, it's so.. you know.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate)

The whole thing screams out the type of people that think it up.

[say592 Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:20PM]

Im assuming by "love" you mean "pr0n".

[go4gr8 Posted Jul 10th 2008 6:47PM]

I just bought the Iomega 1TB HD. Should I have waited?

[Wwhat Posted Jul 11th 2008 8:03AM]

Not at all, you now can buy this too when available and fill 2.5TB total, that should tie you over for a few months. depending on how many BD discs you dowload in a week.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 9:08PM]

Drobo are you ready for this?

6 Tb of storage in a sleek black box.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2008 9:41PM]

Serious n00b question:

Is there any particular reason why this won't work with the new Mac Pro I'm about to buy? The mac store advertises "up to 4TB of hard disk storage". I'm hoping it says that because of current drive capacity, not some limitation in the OS?

Thanks,
~Trav

[Humzanity Posted Jul 10th 2008 11:44PM]

It'll work, chief. It'll work just fine.

[Humzanity Posted Jul 10th 2008 11:44PM]

But if it doesn't, you can give me the Mac Pro.

[Fanfoot Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:14AM]

Wow, imagine 4 of these in a Drobo. You'll have 4 x 1.5 = 6TB of space. Even with the overhead of the redundant copies, that'll still be over 4TB of space, meaning you'll end up with THREE 2TB drives mapped that you'll have to keep track of separately, etc.

Anybody want to fix the stupid 4TB limit on USB drives yet? Or should we just wait until there is a 4TB drive available for laptops?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 4:00AM]

You only get 3 x the capacity when using the 4 drives on a drobo, so you'd get:

(4 x 1.5) - (1 x 1.5) = 4.5TB

not 6. The new drobo has firewire too :)

[Fanfoot Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:19AM]

Oops, I meant 2TB limit.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:37AM]

been fixed for a while... Since 1.1.2 rolled out a few months ago. The new limit is 16TB so even four 5 tb drives will still be one big pool.

[boe Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:29AM]

I'm very happy with Seagate drives but I'm wishing they would spread the love to some larger laptop drives. I can put a few hard drives in my PC but if I want to keep my laptop portable I could use a much larger hard drive.

[Fanfoot Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:43AM]

The OWC Woot site has the Samsung Spinpoint 500GB 2.5" drives available, as mentioned on Engadget previously. Unless you absolutely need a 7200rpm drive, in which case I think you're still stuck at 200GB or maybe 250GB OEM, the laptop drives have just kicked up a notch recently after being stuck at ~100GB for some time...

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 3:36PM]

Well, both WD and Seagate have 320GB 7200RPM notebook drives out...

[Wwhat Posted Jul 11th 2008 7:41AM]

That's going to take quite some time to format/defrag I can tell you, quite some time.

[neofolklore Posted Jul 11th 2008 8:10AM]

"largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives,"

Who thinks that shit up? thats like some excessively epic stuff that Napoleon would say.

[Wwhat Posted Jul 11th 2008 9:57AM]

Wow you are familiar with what napoleon said? In french too?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 11:32AM]

Actually, 1.5TB will be near to 1.4TB.

The exact capacity will be 1.396,98GB (almost 1397GB).

Gradius

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:47PM]

Looks like I'm going to wait till the launch of this drive before setting up my array of 12 drives. Although I needed only around 10TB of space for my home office, it still seems like a good idea to wait for the 1.5 TB drives. Even if these are going to be expensive, the prices on the 1TB drives will fall again which is still a good reason to wait.

I disagree with the risk factor about trusting a drive with so much of data. That's what RAID is for.

I plan to use 12 drives in RAID6 with the XFS filesystem.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:49PM]

Looks like I'm going to wait till the launch of this drive before setting up my array of 12 drives. Although I needed only around 10TB of space for my home office, it still seems like a good idea to wait for the 1.5 TB drives. Even if these are going to be expensive, the prices on the 1TB drives will fall again which is still a good reason to wait.

I disagree with the risk factor about trusting a drive with so much of data. That's what RAID is for.

I plan to use 12 drives in RAID6 with the XFS filesystem.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2008 12:50PM]

Sorry about the double post. Now I look like an idiot.