Seagate busts out 3TB external hard drive for $250
By Vlad Savov 
posted June 29th 2010 8:18AM
posted June 29th 2010 8:18AM
Seagate Breaks Capacity Ceiling With World's First 3 Terabyte External Desktop Drive
New FreeAgent® GoFlex™ Desk External Drive Packs Unprecedented Amount of Storage for both Mac and PC
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Putting more terabytes in the hands of consumers worldwide, Seagate (NASDAQ:STX), the leader in hard drives and storage solutions, today announced the world's first 3 Terabyte (TB) external desktop drive. Available immediately, the 3TB FreeAgent® GoFlex™ Desk external hard drive helps to meet the explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office. With 3TB of capacity people can store up to 120 HD movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or countless hours of digital music.
"Consumer capacity demands are quickly out-pacing the needs of business as people continue to collect high-definition videos, photos and music"
A key addition to the company's recently introduced GoFlex™ family of hard drives, the 3TB GoFlex Desk external drive couples immense capacity with the flexibility to adapt the drive's USB 2.0 interface to a USB 3.0 or FireWire® 800 connection to meet varying performance and transfer speed needs. Consumers can easily create, store and access content from either a Windows® or Mac OS X computer on the GoFlex Desk external drive, thanks to an included NTFS driver for Mac.
"Consumer capacity demands are quickly out-pacing the needs of business as people continue to collect high-definition videos, photos and music," said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management. "Seagate has a tradition of designing products that break into new storage frontiers to meet customer requirements and the 3TB GoFlex™ Desk external drive is no exception–delivering the highest-capacity storage solution available today."
A recent report by Parks Associates indicates the average consumer household will see its digital media storage needs grow to nearly 900GB by year-end 2014, driven in large part by video downloads, managed copies of Blu-ray Disc, and increasing use of DVR recording capabilities1. The GoFlex Desk external drive delivers unconstrained2, high-capacity storage and automatic, continuous backup with software file encryption to help keep all data safe and secure3. The standard USB 2.0 interface can be upgraded to USB 3.0 or FireWire® 800 by coupling the drive with the appropriate GoFlex™ desktop adapter to increase file transfer performance by up to 10x for easier copying or sharing of files4.
"As the definition quality of digital cameras increases, playback devices such as digital photo frames and MP3 players proliferate and the use of the Internet for downloading music and video continues to grow, more files accumulate in the home," said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principle analyst of Parks Associates. "Consumers who are active in digital media creation and consumption will witness their digital media storage needs grow nine-fold by 2014, driving the demand for higher capacity, easy-to-use storage solutions."
The GoFlex Desk external drive is compatible with both the Windows® operating system and Mac® computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The NTFS driver is simply installed once on a Mac computer, allowing it to read and write files on a Windows formatted5 drive. Its sleek black, 3.5-inch design sits either vertically or horizontally to accommodate any desktop environment.
The 3TB GoFlex Desk external drive with USB 2.0 adapter can be purchased on Seagate.com and through select retailers for $249.99.
About Seagate
Seagate is the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions. Learn more at http://www.seagate.com.
© 2010 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Seagate, Seagate Technology, the Wave logo, FreeAgent, and GoFlex are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one thousand billion bytes. Your computer's operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions and will not be available for data storage. Quantitative usage examples for various applications are for illustrative purposes. Actual quantities will vary based on various factors, including file size, file format, features, and application software. Actual data rates may vary depending on operating environment and other factors. The export or re-export of hardware or software containing encryption may be regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security (for more information, visit www.bis.doc.gov). Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications.
1 "Consumer Storage Opportunities," by Kurt Scherf and Pietro Macchiarella, Parks Associates, March 2010.
2 The GoFlex™ Desk external drive has been specially engineered to overcome the Windows HDD limitation of 2.1TB.
3 Included backup software delivered by Memeo and Memeo Premium backup software for Mac.
4 View how the GoFlex family of hard drives works at http://bit.ly/cMVxOP.
5 Reformatting to HFS+ required to use backup software for Mac or Time Machine® software.
At $250 that's actually quite good! Shame they'll probably sell it for £250 if it hits the UK...
@Hobsie
$250 is not really that good a deal. I recently bought a Rosewill dual bay case with 2 x 2 TB Samsung 32 MB cache, all for $275 after discounts from Newegg. It works great and haven't had a hiccup yet.
@Hobsie where are my seagate petabyte drives
@locked
Oh wow...we really do get Royally shafted on tech prices in the UK then. It's a good job then that G.Osbourne was thinking about the middle classes when he announced the budget...
@Hobsie
Yes, I need this. Badly.
But can someone recommend an ext hd for iMac that would be even better than this? Or should I just get this 3tb?
@CDice
ya know... you don't have to keep all the pr0n you download.
@Hobsie: 3TB? where's my internal 3TB drive?
@dardub
Yes I do!
@Hobsie
I bought a WD Elements 2TB external on Amazon 2 weeks ago for $119.99 (its up to 129 now, but if you wait it'll prbly come back down, 1.5TB is 106.49), thats 4TB for $240...granted its a little bigger (or a lot if you consider that you 'd be buying 2) and taking up 2 power outlets/usb ports instead of 1, but in teams of TB/$ its a better deal
@Hobsie
No, I don't think it will be that expensive in the UK, ive found it for £180 incl vat.
@blenderman345 Since you have asked that, your BIOS has been quaking in fear.
@Hobsie Terabyte smoke, Don't breathe this!
@blenderman345
just get it out of that plastic case :D it's just a Sata drive anyway hooked up to a sata to usb connection :p
my god i love opening stuff up ^
that's nice but were are the drives on there own.
Not all of us want to buy a new enclosure every time a new drive comes out.
@Phil3 if it's cheap enough, get it and rip it open. we once had a special deal for two 1tb for the price of one. that was what i did :)
@Phil3
You have to understand that there are some design limits that will make using drives over 2TB as a boot drive a challenge. No longer can you use a standard master boot record (MBR), instead you have to have a board that supports EFI AND Operating system that supports GUI partition tables. Currently there are very few motherboards that support this; additionally, only 64-bit versions of windows can support GPT.
Unfortunately your average consumer won't understand these limits and they will but a drive they can't use, and then complain, blame the manufacturer, and return the drive. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
There are some other workarounds to make this possible, but until EFI and GPT are widely available, manufacturers will avoid shipping drives over 2TB for fear of insanely high return rates (probably enough to cause them a net loss on the drives).
@DracoDan
A great explanation of what's happening right now.
But I'm positive that 3+ TB SATA drives (at least enterprise raid versions) should be coming out soon. With a big fat sticker that reads "DO NOT USE AS A BOOT DRIVE WITH A NON-UEFI BIOS".
@DracoDan I've never tried using any external drive as a boot device - even copying large folders causes some major hiccups for me @ USB 2.0. Anyone out there currently using an external as their main drive? What have your experiences with that been like so far?
@RipTide357 I've had a couple of games on my external and they ran perfectly fine.
@RipTide357
Reread what Phil3 was asking, he was asking about the drive coming out alone, ie an internal 3.5" drive (which is exactly what is in these enclosures).
@iSmug
That is very possible and very likely, but there are still some other major limitations that have to be overcome with a raid card. For example, if you present a single 3TB drive to ESXi 4.0, it will tell you only 1TB is usable. This is thanks to them emulating the SCSI2 protocol. Luckily many cards will allow you see present a single array as separate disks, such as I had to do for my ARECA ARC-1220.
OH SNAP!
Their site just has the 3TB drive on the front page with a Learn More link that takes you to the 1 and 2 TB drives...
you can never have enough terabytes!
@Marko
How many terabytes does your stomach have?
This is great and all, but it's really inefficient. Slow access times when a drive like this is full is going to by abysmal and having to defrag it if you are moving/deleting files constantly is going to be near unbearable.
Better off with smaller 1TB drives till they figure out how to effectively speed up access to all the data stored on these platter based drives. Hard Drive Tech is approaching critical mass, and SSD is no where near the savior they need.
@7egend defragmenting those drives should not really be needed as you mostly use them just for storage anyways. data that gets stored does not fragment on it's own.
and ssds are the savior allready. i moved to a big winhomeserver with currently 4.5tb of storage (such a 3tb drive would fit nicely without the casing), and all my pc's and laptops have small ssds.
this drive fits perfect, if you combine it with an ssd for the os, apps, and the frequent "at work" data (namely the stuff still on the desktop, unsorted)
I have a SSD in every single one of my machines as a boot drive. The latest I have gotten are quite speedy, have TRIM support, and were a mere $105.
I don't need a fast storage drive for holding music, mp3s, videos, etc. Most of these are large streaming files, so access time and the like is really irrelevant.
This is a good price too. =)
@7egend
I never thought that defragmenting a hard drive was really an issue. You can let it do its thing while you sleep. To be completely honest, The SSD that I installed in my laptop doesn't give me a noticeable speed boost than the hard drive that was factory installed in it. I don't think that average computer users would really require that kind of speed out of their drives.
@Wallyum Which SSD drive did you get if you don't mind me asking?
My SSDs beat out my desktop 7200rpm RAID0 array, doesnt require a RAID bios to load, and the random read benchmarks were hundreds of times faster.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2529/4313816364_b73b1557e9.jpg
Bottom right is my old last generation SSD, and you can see it woops the RAID array on the left and the single 2TB drive above it big time. Owns on bootup and app launches, and definitely noticeable. Plus its silent and uses less power and wakeup from sleep is instant. =)
Why buy terabytes when you can have petabytes?
@Distant exactly! But wait..... I havent seen a petabyte drive yet... hahaha ill just stick with my 2TB and 750GB
Why buy petabytes when you can have yottabytes?
@FAP FAP FAP Why buy yottabytes when you can have... Zettabytes?
@Nicko01
What buy zettabytes when you can have exabytes?
@egress63 why buy exabytes when you can buy the infinite drive for 125 bucks?! :b
@Nicko01
Actually, a yottabyte is bigger than both a zettabye and exobyte.
@FAP FAP FAP
As I was explaining to Phil3 above, there are certain limits to partition tables that make larger drives all but impossible. Assuming you have a nice board that uses EFI (or at least a subset of EFI) and the correct OS, you would still be limited to 9.4ZB - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table.
Sorry, no yottabyte drives.
You should have used the term Yobibyte anyway, at least according to the IEC.
But think of the storage!
All those Pictures ... and videos you can put on it.
People's 'collections' are just going to get bigger and bigger.
porn aficionados rejoice! Your collection grows ever larger.
I want lightpeak NOW :) only then is this worthy of my "collection"
@r0x0rmy80x0r
Why? The drive wouldn't be any faster
@EGOvoruhk double the speed of 3.0 , multiple connections to multiple outputs.......if you know what I mean ;)
I'd love to toss four of these (drive only) into my NAS box. 12TB (after RAID 5) would be quite a lift over my current 4x 750GB setup.
@CodyTech
Four 3TB drives in RAID5 would give you 9TB of storage, if I'm not mistaken. One drive's worth of storage is lost to parity.
Hmmm, what is the RPM on this thing? I'm wary that it's in the 5900 realm or even less. Reason why is that their Barracuda XT 7200rpm SATA 2TB alone i've seen in the $299 price range, so this 3TB (single drive?) for $250 seems too good to be true for a 7200rpm disk.
Depends on your use. The slower drives usually have pretty low power draw, which is nice if its a NAS/WHS thats running 24x7.
Why do people trust their external data to anything but a RAID configuration?(minus raid 0)
@nsfw
Because I don't need a redundant mirror of my DVD rips?
@nsfw say it with me RAID IS NOT A BACK-UP!!!!
There now go make A PROPER BACKUP!!!
Raid does NOTHING against.
* File corruption (corrupted files just get copied over)
* Human error (deleting files by mistake)
* Catastrophic damage (someone dumps water onto the server)
* Virus' (goes to both drives)
* Software bugs that wipe out data .. (data gets deleted and the other drive mirrors the deletion.)
http://gcn.com/Blogs/Tech-Blog/2009/01/Mirroring-is-not-backup-and-backup-is-not-archiving.aspx.
Raid is good at if a drive fails and it gets you up and running right away, but all these things can still cause issues.
@nsfw I would use this to backup my backups and sit offsite in case of emergencies. Cheaper in long run than cloud storage and I'm still in control of my data.
@Brainy142
Yes, RAID is for no loss of uptime for failure, not backups.