WD Launches 3 Terabyte HD 313
MojoKid writes "Today, Western Digital announced the world's highest density hard drive, as they reach the 3TB mark with their newest, 5th generation Caviar Green product. The Caviar Green 3TB serves up a super-sized combination of reduced power consumption, lower operating temperature, and a quieter operation. Unfortunately, if you're still using Windows XP, don't expect your system to make full use of any 3TB drive (yet). The problem is that older operating systems, in combination with a legacy BIOS and master boot record (MBR) partition table scheme, face a barrier at 2.19TB. Existing motherboards utilizing BIOS (non-UEFI), GPT ready operating systems like Windows 7 64-bit, and appropriate storage class drivers, can address the entire capacity of hard drives larger than 2.19TB. Another issue is that a number of host bus adapter (HBA) and chipset vendors don't offer driver support for these types of drives. To provide a solution for this compatibility issue, Western Digital bundles an HBA with the Caviar Green 3TB drive that allows the operating system to use a known driver to correctly support extra large capacity drives. This solution is reportedly just temporary until the rest of the industry catches up."
I'm pretty sure they weren't the first. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first. (Score:3, Informative)
No it's a single drive. You can't buy the naked 3gb drive from seagate, but you can buy it already installed in various devices.
Re:3TB is old (Score:1, Informative)
That's external. This one's internal.
Re:Western Digital (Score:4, Informative)
You missed where Maxtor took over Seagate and kept the Seagate name on the door. I know it was techincally (businessally?) the other way around, but the end result has been Maxtor quality with a Seagate sticker.
Re:orly? (Score:1, Informative)
into uranus
Re:Why the space? (Score:4, Informative)
Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?
That would be an SSD, which fails on write, thus keeping any original data around. Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable. As long as you don't fuck it up with a bad firmware update, of course. :)
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:3, Informative)
What I want to know is: how can you justify the cost of tape? And why isn't a raid6 array a valid backup location?
The whole 'raid isn't backup' argument seems a misnomer to me these days.
You're actually arguing with yourself. 'RAID' isn't a backup, it provides fault tolerance for uptime.
A separate and off-site storage target is a valid backup. In fact, most tapes are being replaced with "virtual tape" which is nothing more than disk backed RAID storage located in a different area than the source data.
Stop confusing RAID (within a single storage array) and a separate storage array that also happens to be RAID.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why the space? (Score:4, Informative)
That would be an SSD, which fails on write, thus keeping any original data around. Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable.
In theory, that's what's supposed to happen on the cell-level. In practice, companies are often not so considerate in making things fail gracefully. Often the whole drive just bricks itself.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:3, Informative)
I don't believe you can purchase a chassis with an externally accessible hard drive array, hard drives and carriages for the drives to emulate a tape changer for less money than you can purchase a large capacity tape changer and the equivalent storage in tapes.
If you're backing up a small office, home office or tiny corporate environment, then go for it, just use some externally accessible array that can export everything JBOD and manage the device by hand, but if you need more than a few drives to back things up, the overhead and maintenance cost would quickly outstrip the cost of the tapes, drive and tape changer.
at $0.0375 per GB for LTO4 tape, the hard drives aren't really cheaper either.
What I do is have a multi TB array used for disk-to-disk backups and as a cache for the disk-to-tape backups. Write the disk backups as virtual tapes, then shuffle off the virtuals to real tapes. That leaves the latest full backup and incremental on hard drive, and old backups on tape. Someone deletes a file, just restore it from hard drive backups. Someone deletes a file and realizes it was last week, recall the tapes and restore it from there if there is business justification for the added cost to retrieve one file.
As prices drop, and capacities increase, the solution to this equation changes to favor hard drives as tapes aren't increasing in capacity or decreasing in price to match hard drives.
Give it three years and then start grinding up your old tapes.
Re:I'm pretty sure they weren't the first. (Score:2, Informative)
Nope. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review
Re:Old-school workaround (Score:3, Informative)
This is an issue at the block level, so no.
Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens? (Score:3, Informative)
Why does a log need to write to a disc more than once per minute. Really?
For 99.9% of uses there is no reason.
There is no reason the log can't simply cache the results to memory and write to the disc once every minute or every couple minutes.
How about when your OS is clever and tries to reduce disk use by only flushing the OS block cache intermittently, and that interval is slightly greater than the park timer?
then change the interval. If the clever OS flushed once per minute it wouldn't be an issue.
The idea that all data needs to be discretely written intermittently with a cycle time of seconds is dubious.
Two options:
a) better software
b) use drive w/ longer park time and accept higher (wasted) energy use.
XP often won't wake up from S3 on 1+GB SATA drives (Score:3, Informative)