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."
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for you. In the last year, I've put about 8.5 TB into my house (without a single torrent) and I could use another 3 TB. Running a small recording studio digitally has it's upsides and downsides.
A 5x 3TB Raid 6 sounds just about right for a nice 9TB assembly. (And yes, I know, Raid isn't a backup, there's tapes for that.)
short-sightedness (Score:5, Insightful)
If you make SATA controllers, and you didn't see 3TB coming coming years in advance, you need to get the hell out of the hardware business. You are incompetent. Go find another line of work.
Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:short-sightedness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:short-sightedness (Score:5, Insightful)
If you make SATA controllers, and you didn't see 3TB coming coming years in advance, you need to get the hell out of the hardware business. You are incompetent. Go find another line of work.
On the other hand if you saw 3TB coming, built SATA controllers that only handled 1TB AND charged an early-adopter premium, THEN conned users into upgrading to the 2TB version later, AND NOW can get them to upgrade again for 3TB you're brilliant and if not rich at least living comfortably.
Re:3TB (Score:1, Insightful)
A) Raid is not backup.
B) Oh noes, I lost all my torrented tv shows and my mmorpg installs! How can I ever replace those!?
Besides, if the data does matter, like the recording studio guy, these days the best backup strategy is still an external/removable drive. If you're filling a 3 Tb internal, you have a 3 Tb external to copy to. Size really doesn't matter.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Ken Thompson said, "The steady state of disks is full". No matter how big drives get, you'll eventually fill it up. At which point you'll need a bigger one, or you'll be spending an inordinate amount of time (any really) moving shit around and deciding what to delete.
Re:3TB (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why I keep all my data on DVDs. That way, if one goes bad, I'll only lose 4 gigabytes!
Of course, if I really wanted to be safe, I should use CDs. That way I'd only lose a few hundred megabytes.
But then again, real safety is in 3 1/2" floppies. Then I'd only lose 1.44 megabytes!
5 1/4" floppies! 360 kb!
Single bits stored as rocks! 1/8th byte!
Or I could wait ten years and be the guy saying "1 petabyte drives!? Ha! I'll keep my nice old 3 terabyte drives, thank you very much."
Re:Too bad it's WD (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why the space? (Score:3, Insightful)
Define the drive as 20 partitions and raid-1 them all together.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but why? It sounds like you have hundreds of hours of video stored locally. Do you really watch that much tv?
Buying a few terabytes of disk space is much easier than convincing your girlfriend that she really didn't need to watch that episode of CSI Milton Keynes from last March that you just deleted.
Re:Do they self destruct like other Greens? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you REALLY need to write to the disc 2x a minute every single minute continually for the life of the machine.
Most likely the answer is no. For 99.9% of the people thee is no benefit to writing to the disc continually every 30 seconds as opposed to once a minute or less.
For the 0.01% of people who absolutely must continually write to the disc all the time WD makes a drive series for that. Black series.
Problem solved. Why should WD "fix" the green series drives (optimized for low power consumption) by making them park less thus increasing consumption for a "feature" (to accommodate poorly written software) used by 1% of the population.
Buy the right tool. If you need to write to the disc multiple times per second continually (instead of buffering) for the life of the drive then buy a drive designed to do that.
Re:'yet'? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because there is still software that doesn't run on 64 bit Windows of course.
I use such software daily in my work.
So it's not "dead, Jim."
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly I find that I archive less and less.
Donated all my DVD (almost never watch them again) to charity (nice writeoff).
Quick what % of your DVD have you watched at least 10 times. Hell how many of them have you watched only once or twice?
Storing DVD is of dubious value IMHO. In 20-30 years it will be the digital equivelent of people who stored every single newspaper in case they needed.
With netflix, VOD (both from cable and online), hulu, itunes, redbox, etc the need to store TB of pre-generated content seems quaint.
Take the cost of the DVD + cost (in $ value of your time) of ripping them + cost to archive them divided by number of uses. If it is more than $2 - $3 a view you are paying more than just paying per use.
Now people w/ lots of personal unique content (family photos, video, original composistions, personal files, etc) storage makes sense. One can't simply go to a redbox pay $2 and get a copy of last summer vacation video.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:3, Insightful)
No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
you never had a girlfriend did you?
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why the space? (Score:3, Insightful)
Either the moderation is a "insightful for funny" mod or it's on crack. Only one 3.2 GB or so drive I had many yeats ago has failed in that way, all the others have gone completely bye-bye which means all 20 partitions go down at once. It's not redundant when the same failure will knock out all of them...
Re:Too bad it's WD (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. Google released a bunch of data on hard disk reliability, not broken down by manufacturer but they said it didn't make much difference. And you know big OEMs like Dell keep track of warrany HDD failures and the "That #%*&%/# Dell ate my documents" hit to their reputation as opposed to other hardware that just breaks means they'd get rid of any poor manufacturers quickly, even if they were slightly cheaper. Also people that deliver big storage solutions and such. Of course you could end up with a lemon model but you wouldn't really know that until late in the game when its reliability numbers really diverge.
Re:The industry can take all the time it needs (Score:3, Insightful)
A few tearabytes of disk space and some DVD box sets are a quick and easy way to get carte blanche on the computing expenses.
Putting her favorite shows at her fingertips is the quickest path to the greatest WAF.