Seagate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive 467
Stoobalou writes "After a few weeks of rumours, Seagate's senior product manager Barbara Craig has confirmed that the company is announcing a 3TB drive later this year, but the move to 3TB of storage space apparently involves a lot more work than simply upping the areal density. The ancient foundations of the PC's three-decade legacy has once again reared its DOS-era head, revealing that many of today's PCs are simply incapable of coping with hard drives that have a larger capacity than 2.1TB."
Re:does it work with Windows 98? (Score:3, Interesting)
If games are the only thing holding you back, let me recommend GOG.com or if you're really old school Dos Box.
Both are awesome suggestions, but I still like having a top-of-the-line PC circa the year 2000 with Windows 98 installed on it laying around. It's like using an NES emulator vs. playing a game on NES hardware. Sure, you technically are playing the same game...but the experience isn't quite the same :-)
Legacy be damned. (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem lies with fat32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table [wikipedia.org]
Fat32 has other problems but the real issue here is volume size. Easy to overcome, just partition the drive. (I think I remember doing the same thing to 1.2GB drives too and fat16.)
Besides SSD/flash that is used in camera/mp3 players/camcorders, why would anybody be using fat32 on a drive that massive? Common file access on dual/tri boot computers can be an issue, but folks smart enough to do that are smart enough to build a file-server.
Some legacy components are wonderful because they "just work" (ps/2 vs USB). But trying to shoehorn a new tech into an old standard just leads to problems.
One other issue with this announcement; why did they bother with 3TB? Should the next step be 4TB? We are counting in binary are we not?
How long can the growth last? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there anyone who currently works in that area or has a background in magnetic storage who has a better idea?
Re:XP + 3 TB?? (Score:1, Interesting)
tried win7. failed right out of the box (did not connect to my freebsd and linux samba servers). took a lot of reading and some reg tweaks and still could not get it to work. all the rest of the gear in my net works fine in my samba network (popcorn hour media streamer, mac osx, winxp, linux, bsd). ALL but win7. funny, that.
I gave up and deinstalled win7 and went back to xp. my network is whole again.
when they 'fixed' smb on win7, they broke my whole network (for all pract. purposes). it took too much effort to find what was wrong (might be winbind since I don't run that for my other clients but win7 may need it); but I was not, after hours and hours, able to get it working.
tell me again how wonderful win7 is? when I can't even get a working network of samba systems to connect to win7?
that was enough to fail the test for me. a bunch of others, too, I'm sure, since win7 is notorious (and vista too) for doing this.
Re:Legacy be damned. (Score:4, Interesting)
We are counting in binary are we not?
Not when it comes to disk drives. The total storage in a spinning media drive is based on the number of platter sides used, which can range from 1 to 6 (or perhaps 8 ... does anyone still use four platters?), the areal density of storage on the surface, and how much of the surface is devoted to spare tracks to cover for manufacturing defects (and probably other factors I'm forgetting). None of these are based on powers of two phenomena.
Re:How long can the growth last? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think we're coming close to the limits now. I've heard that there's already interference in the data tracks from the other nearby tracks' magnetic fields, and to make it much smaller will need some advances in error checking/correction.
Seagate reliability (Score:4, Interesting)
But I seem to detect that quality and reliability is returning to Seagate's devices. Does anybody have any recent experience with Seagate to share?
Re:Legacy be damned. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm guessing what Seagate really did was come out with a 750GB platter, that can be used to produce a 3GB drive with 4 of those platters.
Minor nitpick but that would be a 6TB drive. Probably 2 dual sided platters at 0.750TB per side.
Re:XP + 3 TB?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Because there's no way anyone would attach old peripherals to newer machines ...
Re:XP + 3 TB?? (Score:0, Interesting)
everyone is suggesting that things are not correctly configured on my end. if that is so, why would a good collection of clients (already listed; includes embedded as well as windows and unix and mac) be able to connect to all my shares (hosted on freebsd8.current, ubuntu 9.something) and yet the ONLY thing that won't connect is win7. does that REALLY suggest the rest of my network and clients/servers are ALL WRONG?
it could be that samba is running in a 'just barely legal' config and like I said, I don't run winbind and I have recently been told that its needed (no longer optional). perhaps that's what triggered the win7 incompat. but it sure is strange that ALL the rest of my mixed network sees and can write to my smb (and nfs) shares and yet win7 is the only one that won't work.
there are registry hacks to turn off 128bit mode and some other lanmanager stuff. I did all that (it was needed for others) but that did not help my win7 box see any of my shares.
out of the box, win-xp was able to work just fine in my network. I did not go thru this nutso debug scene with winxp and my unix smb servers. win7 *definitely* changed something and I find it funny that the finger is pointed at me and my network.