Seagate to Release 3TB Hard Drive
PrintIt's been rumored for a while, but Seagate has now confirmed they will be releasing a 3TB hard drive later this year. This isn't just the usual upping of platter density to achieve a higher capacity. In this case Seagate had to overcome some fundamental problems in computing.
In modern computing systems, there is a logical block addressing (LBA) limit of 2.1TB. The LBA system can't address a capacity larger than that due to the fact that it assigns an address to each 512 byte block on the hard drive, causing it to run out of address space at 2.1TB. Seagate is using a new Long LBA format, but it requires a supporting OS.
According to Seagate, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and 7 will work, but XP will not. In fact, XP systems may only see 990MB of the drive. Another caveat is that these drives will not work as boot drives, just as secondary drives. Current master boot record partitions are limited to 2.1TB, and the fix would be more complicated.
No one thought that LBA would be a limiting factor when it was developed in 1980, but here we are. No pricing information was available, but we imagine it will sell at a premium at first. Would you buy a 3TB drive? Or are a few smaller ones fine by you?
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lashonazi
October 04, 2010 at 5:17am
What movies are pre-installed? "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"? or "Lord of the Rings" in HD?
nightkiller
May 18, 2010 at 9:42pm
Why does Seagate say that the drive isn't supported on XP? GPT partitions are supported on XP 64 bit and they can handle up to 18 Exabytes- even as a boot partition.
You choose a flightless bird as a mascot and wonder why it doesn't take off?
Caboose
June 03, 2010 at 7:38am
Yes, because how widly used is XP 64bit? Standard 32bit flavours of XP are everywhere, and anyone with 2 brain cells will use Vista or Windows 7 for their desktop 64bit computing as the performance, support, etc is lightyears ahead of XP ever was.
Heck, I'm sure Microsoft has all but forgotten XP 64bit too...
So, I'd say that Seagate is correct in it's statement, that these drives aren't supported on Windows XP. Ask anyone (IT field) when they hear Windows XP, do they think 32bit or 64bit and see what you get more of...
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
mls067
May 18, 2010 at 5:38pm
oh,,just in time for my WHS build!
btw, thanks to the folks on the message board for the help and suggestions on this.
My plug for the board! (like it needs it ;-)
razorpetti37
May 18, 2010 at 8:56am
If this drive isn't as loud as a helicopter and doesn't read/write at snail pace, this would be perfect for home theater computers. I've got a HTPC at the bottom of my entertainment stand and currently carries (3) 1 TB drives that are almost full. There is literally almost nothing on these drives besides Windows, a few ripping programs, and almost 350 ripped DVDs. You start throwing ripped Blu-Rays on there and you are looking at about 40GB a peice if they are uncompressed. So what if there is a drive failure....I've got (3) 1 TB external drives to backup each internal drive.
If I was satisfied with my current capacity, I could save a lot of space and potentially save a lot of money by cutting it from 6 drives down to 2 (with an additional small internal drive for the OS). If I replicated my current layout using these new 3 TB drives, I'd be looking at close to 9 TB internally. I could rip more than 200 uncompressed Blu-Ray movies with that much storage! If I were only ripping DVDs, I'd practically be the neighborhood Blockbuster.
spentnickles
May 18, 2010 at 6:58am
I have a WHS with 6TB of storage now, my "home computer" has 8Tb in it, I have two spare WD Black 1TB drives on the shelf - 3 external 1.5Tb drives on my desk and almost all full...and lots of other random external drives. I rip every piece of software that I have to a digital copy, I own Adobe CS3, CS4 and am waiting on CS5 to arrive, all of my Windows OS's, a Few distros of Linux (Knoppix, Fedora, and Ubuntu - and still have the Win 7 Beta copies) and all media that I can rip... The reason, discs fail...optical and magnetic.
...back in '97 I bought my first "off the shelf" computer - $1899 at CompUSA for a P2 333, 8Gb HDD, 64Mb Ram, a DVD-Rom, a 17" CRT monitor and Windows 98. I picked up a copy of Win98SE to install later... When I got around to it, I put the disc in my then new Yamaha CDRW 12X20X24 burner...only to hear it spin up and shatter on the first go (the disc had never been taken out of the Jewel case... I wrote Microsoft to ask for a replacement disc and got a "not our problem" response... From that point on, I have copied all media that I have...
Would I buy one right away, no; do I need that much storage - HELL YES! I only find it interesting that the "LBA ISSUE" is just now being addressed though...and why are we still using BIOS? Anyway...
semillertime
May 18, 2010 at 6:49am
I believe the issue is not LBA directly, but that paritition tables only allocate 32bits for LBA addressing out of a possible 48. 48-bit LBA in and of itself can support drives up to 144PetaBytes. (2 ^ 48 * 512B = 144PB) Because of the 32b limit of the partition table, only 2TB drives are supported. (2 ^ 32 * 512B = 2TB).
Deanjo
May 17, 2010 at 10:11pm
"In modern computing systems, there is a logical block addressing (LBA) limit of 2.1TB."
Of course every intel mac has had the ability to use GUID Partition Tables with EFI since 2006. So how do you consider "modern computing systems" having this limitation?
Deanjo
May 18, 2010 at 5:12am
"Oh and I am sure there is some rule against using anything not apple
certified in a mac unit that will prevent you from; getting phone
support, technically installing the os back on the system, get you
arrested in 49 states because it's illegal according to apple or some
crap."Well like the rest of your arguement you would be wrong. Apple won't warrantee the replacement drive, the rest is still fully covered.
mgalletly
May 17, 2010 at 9:44pm
And with thousands of pictures, mp3s, several hours of home movies and about 120 DVD movies ripped, I still have plenty of space. I don't need a three TB drive. I need faster drives. Give me a 1TB bigger WD Raptor on the SATA 6GB bus. Or better yet, a 1TB SSD on SATA 6GB that won't require me to refinance my mortgage. That's what I need. WHS is only 32-bit right now so I couldn't take advantage of the size even if I wanted to.
WilliamLynch
May 17, 2010 at 9:31pm
why cant they just give me a drive with 2.1 TB of formatting capacity and just leave it at that?
Keith E. Whisman
May 17, 2010 at 7:19pm
With a cheap 3TB HDD on the horizon why do we need Cloud computing again? I mean if Storage was a problem then yes cloud computing sounds great but damn we have tons of storage available in our computers these days and cheaply at that. I hate it when MS and other OS makers say they are planning on Cloud based OS'es being the next big thing because it's just stupid. We have tons of storage for our applications and OS'es that bring usability not seen before in human existence.
I'm sure that there is a very easy fix for the 2.1TB barrier and I'm sure it'll be implemented quickly via a bios update. Speaking about Bios when can we expect to see the BIOS come to it's demise?
Great article but I don't believe that we will never be able to boot to a 3TB HDD. I think it's just a matter of time.
omen3330
May 18, 2010 at 2:29pm
Advantage of the cloud is redundancy, your data is not in one place that can burn down or flood.
pastorbob
May 17, 2010 at 7:02pm
I recently bought two 500 gig hard drives for $49.99 each to replace my aging 250 gig drives, and divided them into three partitions each. I am running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. I have over 10,000 digital photos, 4,000+ mp3 songs in my music library, Logos 4.0c Bible software with several gigs of books and resources, Office 2007 Pro, a huge library of Word documents, Power Point presentations, and Excel spreadsheets. I have Unreal installed along with a library of personal video files. Even with all of that I am only using about 30% of my available storage. Why on earth would I need a 3 Terabyte drive that won't even boot my system. Not to mention from both security and performance considerations it is better to have two or three smaller drives than one huge drive.
Thursday
May 17, 2010 at 7:04pm
...and then my wife discovered how to use the Media Center function to record her TV shows and stream them to my 360. I now have a 1TB drive that is almost 70% full of soaps and other assorted chick shows. Oh, and House. ;)
omen3330
May 18, 2010 at 2:30pm
Yeah I though the same, and My TB is almost filled within 2 months of purchase.
pastorbob
May 18, 2010 at 6:13am
in my household that isn't an issue. Don't watch much TV. For those shows that we do watch we have no desire to archive them. If we miss it, no big deal. Catch the rerun or get them from Netflix when they are released on DVD. But then we didn't see Avatar until a couple of days before it came out on Blu-Ray. We were the only two in the theatre. It was really kinda cool.
However I can definitely see the need for a lot of storage space if your system is used as an entertainment center. But I still think it would be better to have the archives spread over three or four smaller drives than on one huge drive. What if the drive crashes which has been known to happen? Everything is lost rather than just a portion of it.
Keith E. Whisman
May 18, 2010 at 1:32pm
Your lucky that you were the only two in the theater. When I went with my family to see Avatar I was surrounded by sweating tree huggin liberal hippies that look at Avatar as a positive way of life that everyone should be forced to live. These stoned hippies actually believe Avatar native life is a viable lifestyle. None of these hippies have ever actually camped out and what about hunting to survive they just ignore that aspect of life especially when you talk to these hippies they are also mostly proud Vegans. But as I said they ignore the hunter gatherer fact of life. They also ignore the hardships of living in the wild like surviving a bitterly cold winter with little food. Looking your hungry starved children in the eyes when you tell them that your hunt was unsuccessful yet again.
I'm not kidding there are alot of freaking idiots out there that actually believe in Avatar. It just drives me nuts to know there are nutty people like that.
I did like Avatar however. And as I said your the lucky one.
gtubbesing
July 07, 2010 at 6:17pm
What the hell does this have to do with anything at all in this thread! Jeez, some people will jump at any excuse to bitch about their poor excuse for a life!
andrewc513
May 17, 2010 at 6:58pm
"Another caveat is that these drives will not work as boot drives, just as secondary drives. Current master boot record partitions are limited to 2.1TB, and the fix would be more complicated."
So... could you use this as a boot drive if you triple booted 3 1TB partitions???
Baer
May 17, 2010 at 6:07pm
For the first time since I got my first 5 Mb HDD in the early 80's I do not need more storage. Between my almost 2 Tb and my 3 Tb on my WHS I am crusing with room to spare for once. If I needed more storage I still have one SATA port left and room in the case for another drive.
As for as the Xp limit, that is no issue and I only have Xp on one old wimpy notebook that I use for presentations.
Jox
May 17, 2010 at 5:55pm
I'll buy one 6 months to a year after release. Based on Seagate's previous performance with large capacity drives, I don't think that's an unreasonable adoption rate. Let the rich kids work out the bugs for me.
-Jox
hagbard
May 17, 2010 at 5:53pm
I could see myself using this in a Linux server, where the capacity would be supported. However, I won't be using one of these on my desktop, due to XP's lack of support.
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