Seagate Releases 3TB External Drive for $250 272
A few anonymous readers noted that Seagate has released a 3TB external drive. This makes it the largest 3.5-inch in its class, and it is available with USB 2, 3, or FireWire. That's more capacity than my entire four-drive RAID for just $250.
Re:Ugh. Seriously? (Score:2, Informative)
Seagate already announced their drives would hit some limitations of the LBA standard, so -if I'm correct- their drives would only run on 64-bit windows systems using modified controllers. The enclosure probably avoids these problems.
Re:One drive are two? (Score:4, Informative)
So if people are just interested in the drive they can crack the case and get it. Also, according to the above link the GoFlex connection thingy will work for any SATA drive, so you can use it like a HDD hot swap docking station of sorts.
Re:Ugh. Seriously? (Score:1, Informative)
It's even worse than that. Boot records have a max at 2.1 TB or something IIRC, and so you pretty much need to drop BIOS in order to use it fully. Unless you've got an UEFI motherboard from somewhere, in which case I imagine that you could pry it out and get it to work.
Re:That's a Whole lot (Score:2, Informative)
You'd need a Beowulf cluster of these to contain it all.
Re:I think I know why it's external. (Score:1, Informative)
It doesn't work in 100% of all bioses actually. 3TB and up can only (practically) be partitioned using GPT. Regular partition tables can only encode a length and/or offset of up to 2TB, so you would be forced to partition it in two parts, where neither can be larger than 2TB. That approach would halt at 4TB anyway, as then the offset field is just plain too small.
When you switch to GPT you don't have a boot sector (MBR) anymore; you get an EFI loader. That means that most systems would need an EFI instead of a BIOS so they wouldn't work.
They're not masquerading. They're protecting the innocent & stupid masses from a non-working device because their software is too shitty to support it.
Re:Buy two (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, didn't read parent (or even it's subject line) properly.
Quick chat with Seagate Tech Support: (Score:4, Informative)
I chatted with Bryan W. with Seagate Support this morning.
My first thought was, hmm, did they do this sly and slip two 1.5TB drives in as raid 0? But, no, they didn't. It IS actually just one 3.5" 3TB SATA drive.
The distributed technical support documentation didn't have the cache or RPM, but the representative was leaning towards the RPM being 7200.
I even went so far as to ask about it working if removed from the enclosure. Since it meets SATA standards, he believed it would work without hindrance. The wording was "it's an internal drive in an enclosure."
So, very hopeful. My guess is we're seeing the External solution released first, and in the next coming weeks we'll see the internal version with more specs up here soon.
Re:A lot of eggs in one basket... (Score:5, Informative)
RAID is not a very good failover system. It never was, and it never will. Disks on raid often have extremely similar use patterns, leading to very similar drive life. When one drive in a RAID dies, it's not uncommon to see one or two more die at nearly the same time.
We have enough disks to lose one or two a month in our systems, and I'd have to say that a dual-disk failure in the same system is pretty uncommon.
Real failover comes from offline backups.
That's called disaster recovery, not "failover".
RAID is a reliability solution first, performance solution second (albeit a close second). It does an excellent job at that, unless you Do It Wrong (RAID5s with double-digit spindle counts and/or no hotspares, using RAID 0+1 instead of 1+0, running for extended periods of time with a degraded array, etc).
Re:I think I know why it's external. (Score:3, Informative)
The BIOS doesn't need to "work with" a hard drive, unless you're running a legacy OS (DOS, Windows 95, etc) on it. Any GPT-enabled version of GRUB / LILO / etc. will allow a BIOS-based system to boot-up a Linux (or FreeBSD, or ...) kernel on drives of any size. The BIOS only needs to recognize the first few sectors, so it can read the instructions on the header of the disk.
Windows, OTOH, will not work, as Microsoft refuses to handle the boot-strapping process without firmware support, and so demands the use EFI for GPT partitions.
This is just pedantry. It's perfectly understandable people will call EFI their "BIOS", even though it is technically a different type of firmware.