Seagate confirms 3TB hard drive for 2010, possible 32-bit OS issues
By Darren Murph 
posted May 17th 2010 5:16PM
posted May 17th 2010 5:16PM
Seagate has been pushing the areal density envelope for years now, but by and large, these "developments" we hear about typically fade into the cold, harsh winter night without ever amounting to anything tangible. Not so this go 'round, with the company confirming to Thinq (and reaffirmed on our end) that it will be "announcing a 3TB drive later this year." If you'll recall, 2TB drives have held the crown for the world's largest since early 2009, and if all goes to plan, we'll be able to buy drives 50 percent larger than even those before the dawn of 2011. The company didn't talk details -- we're still left to envision a price, release date and spindle speed -- but it didn't hesitate to mention a few issues that users with older operating systems may encounter. Essentially, you'll need to have a rig that's fully capable of handling the Long LBA (logical block addressing) standard, which means that you'll need updated drivers, an updated BIOS and either a 64-bit copy of Vista, Windows 7 or "modified version of Linux." As you'd expect, Windows XP users needn't pay this platter any mind, and while Seagate is hopeful that industry players will all rally in short order to support the new HDD, there's still a chance that these growing pains will lead to delays. What we're most jazzed about here, crazily enough, isn't the predictable jump in capacity -- it's the fantasies of über-cheap 2TB drives once they fall from the top.[Thanks, JC]
Down with Windows XP! Long live Windows 7!
Seagate is taking a risky step but someone was bound to do this anyhow. This will force every motherboard manufacture to redesign the motherboard without the outdated cmos/bios system. This better boot! haha....
@Dafrety
That is truly an Amazing amount of pRon @_@
@Dafrety Down with XP? As long as you mean on new sales. There's nothing wrong with XP on hold hardware, especially with hardware 7 doesn't support. And whilst we're at it, down with Windows 7 32bit.
Windows 7 32-bit exist?!? I've never heard of such a thing!
@Dafrety Down with Windows 7, Viva Snow Leopard
@luckycharette
No, because chances are you're running a 32-bit OS.
@MrDiSante
I don't see why 32-bit vs 64-bit is the issue. The bit refers to memory address space. As far as I remember, it was MBR that couldn't be extended beyond 2TB without non-default cluster sizes, which can cause problems with some applications. The solution is to simply use GPT, which is supported as a data drive on any system running Vista, 7, and even Server 2003, although in order to use it as a boot drive you need EFI. Can anyone shed any light on why 32-bit vs 64-bit matters for hard drive capacity?
@Schmich
It's not like Seagate is going to stop producing smaller, '32-bit compatible' HDD anytime soon.
1TB plates anyone? The density is both scary and possibly unreliable...
I'd still probably get one for my home server...
@kapanak
Every single time. Every single time HDDs get a capacity upgrade someone is worried about the density and the reliability. This has been happening since HDDs first showed up. I don't think there is anything to really worry about.
@Dafrety
Unless I am mistaken the failure rate for 2TB drives is higher than for 1TB or 1,5TB drives.
@kapanak
i have some 500meg drives i want to sell you
@DetlevCM Yes, just like failure rates for 500GB HDD's are higher then 320GB, 320GB higher then 250GB, etc...
The larger the HDD the large the failure's effect will be.
@DetlevCM
Links please?
@p0p0
actually, I don't believe that. If I recall correctly, google did a report on hard drives and found that the rpm of the drive is the real key for reliability. slower drives last longer - little to do with density.
@p0p0
Do you mean failure effect or failure rate? They're two different things. The effect is larger because you're losing more data, but do 500GB HDDs have a higher chance of experiencing a failure than say a 320GB one?
@kapanak
Higher capacity means more data at risk. In near future we may be seeing RAID 1 or 5 as a common desktop user setup. Or maybe some better way to store data redundantly with low cost.
I remember buying Seagate SATA 160gb HDD when it was released (5 years warranty). A chip on the main board got burnt, but didn't get any replacement. I came across same issue with 2 more person's HDDs (obviously same model).
Anyway thumbs up for better inventions.
@Venkataraja
Having raid 1 will not be a common setup in the near future as it will still be twice as expensive as not having it. The same prediction could have been made 2 years ago, or 10 years ago - makes no difference. Redundancy will always come at a higher price and those who need it will have to pay for it.
What's really important is that these drives also need to be faster.
It's not so much losing data that hurts, but losing the time spent to accumulate that data and then losing it. If you had a 10TB drive and could fill it up in 30 minutes with super-fast internet. You probably wouldn't care if it failed because you only lost 30 minutes of your time. Now, if you spent a year to fill up a 100GB drive and the drive failed, that would hurt a lot more.
@jstevens
Google's report did not show that the spindle speed was the important factor; it was the number of spindles in the drive. I guess that makes sense -- those drives have more moving parts and their data is spread out over a wider area, and since failure of one platter means the whole drive is essentially lost, statistically drives with a high platter count would fail more often.
@John H
thanks for the correction.
that makes sense.
@jstevens Not all disk usage comes from downloads, if you use any video editing or massive design work, Gigabytes will be torn through like a lawnmower through grass.
I was expecting 4 TB. Not that I'm complaining. I see a couple 2 TB Greens in my future.
@guruboy
I just bought one today :)
Sux it's only actually only 1.8GB (Why can't HDD manufactures and Microsoft get along?). That's f*cking 200GB short! Some HDD's aren't even 200GB's, lol. I remember back when that that amount was negligible, and now we're talking 200GB's short...it's amazing.
@thedude
The reason for that discrepancy is because Japanese manufacturers who make these drives use decimal for measuring capacity, so their definitions are as follows:
1 TB = 1000 GB; 1 GB = 1000 MB; 1 MB = 1000 KB
Software like operating systems and computers in general measure things in binary, so in that realm the definitions are:
1 TB = 1024 GB; 1 GB = 1024 MB; 1 MB = 1024 KB.
It's the same reason a 4.7 GB DVD only has 4.38 GB or so of usable capacity; one measures in decimal and the other in binary. Back in the dark ages, that discrepancy of of 24 KB per MB didn't amount to a whole lot of the total capacity of the media, but now that we're talking terabytes, as you've noticed it adds up. The problem is that no one wants to be the first to switch to the "right" or compatible binary counting method. If you saw a 1TB drive sitting next to a 946TB drive for the same price, all else being equal, which would you pick? In reality they'd have the exact same capacity, but most people don't know this.
@John H
1TB drive sitting next to a 946 *GB* drive, my bad.
I read aereal densit as Areola density. Anyone else?
@Prevacator Nope, just you. How did you manage to mentally connect nipples with hard drives anyway?
@r3loaded
Thinking about all the pr0n that could be stored...
@47MasoN47
This.
@47MasoN47 If someones needs that much porn they should just get a mate.
@Quackula
If someone needs this much porn, they probably can't get one.
@Prevacator I thought it, too.
@SmoothMarx
Blu-Ray Pr0n takes up a lot of space :)
Too bad you won't be able to use this as a boot drive anyways. Windows mbr maximum size is 2tb. Recently discovered this when trying to install onto a 3tb raid array. It simply will not format and install the os onto a drive that large.
@Lewis26
You need UEFI + a 64 bit version of Windows 7 or Windows Vista in order to boot off of a hard drive or RAID array that's greater than 2 TiB.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table#Windows_64-bit_versions
@Lewis26
Linux ftw. You can get around that by setting up a small NTFS partition for booting and then use a GPT partition for the rest.
@47MasoN47
I don't know... I wouldn't recommend doing that. Even though Mac OS X's Boot Camp works by doing that (which is creating a Hybrid MBR), trying to do it manually with Linux is ugly and painful.
@Metayoshi
On Linux I just use EXT4 and don't worry about it, that's the beauty of Linux :D
I have a setup with the GPT parition on 2 of the servers here at the office, but they are both Server 2008 x64.
@Lewis26
Boot to SSD, use 3tb as storage...
@pretol and what do we do when we have cheap 3TB SSDs?
oh, nevermind, i probably won't live that long :)
@47MasoN47 I just use Windows and don't worry about it :)
One more reason to discontinue 32-bit OS's
I guess since the 1TB drive came out, I'm over focusing on the size of the drive. All I care about is speed and noise. Give me an SSD drive that costs $1/GB.
Surely the hard drive market, overall, hasn't reached a point where people are ditching even their 250GB hard drives all that often because they don't have enough space. Who honestly will need more than 1TB in the next 5 years? Maybe 1 out of every 100,000 computer users?
The market is no longer in the size department store, it's in the speed department.
@wicketr
Photographers for example - and if you record video its even worse.
But not necessarily in a computer - more as "outside storage".
@wicketr
These could be incredibly useful for servers or personal NAS setups. Photographers and videographers obviously would love the space. There are tons of places where this would be perfect.
@wicketr I can't imagine why anyone would possibly need more than a 1 TB of space.
Hopefully I'm quoted in 10 years!
@wicketr
Uhhh...we (only my gf and I) have 2 desktops and an HTPC. Between them, a rough counts gives a total HD capacity of ~8.5TB (not counting our laptops). Between all the computers, we have only around 1.5TB free.
When you use computers as workstations, gaming, multimedia machine with tens of thousands of audio files, many HD 1080P or 720P rips of blu-rays, HDTV recordings of entire series, etc., it does not take long to fill up even a couple 2TB drives.
@Xcelerate
I didn't say that. I said beyond the 1 out of 100,000 users who do have a legitimate purpose, who else needs it in the next 5 years? Of course in 20 years, PetaByte HDs will be all the rage.
I just think that in today's atmosphere, a 250GB hard drive can handle 90% of the market. A 1TB drive covers 99.9% of the market. And a 2TB drive covers 99.999% of the market.
What could you possible use 3TB for?