3TB Hard Drives Square Off Against Everything Else 160
crookedvulture writes "Last week, Western Digital announced its intention to buy rival drive maker Hitachi. Interestingly, those are the only two companies with 3TB hard drives available for sale. The Tech Report takes a closer look at how the two models compare with each other and over 30 different hard drives and SSDs. The resulting data paints a detailed picture of the storage landscape and is worth skimming for anyone curious about how spindle speeds and flash memory impact performance, power consumption, and noise."
too late for wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
lol.. someone tell the super-aspergers at wikipedia they dont need to delete knowledge anymore... we have 3TB harddrives now...
Re:My 2TB hard drive is so big... (Score:2, Insightful)
WDC - WTF?! (Score:4, Insightful)
From someone whose Hitachi backup drive just saved his bacon when his 4th WDC drive this year failed, I'd say this is bad news.
Maybe its time to buy a shedload of these 3Tb drives before WDC gets their hands on them and they become Deathstars again.
Re:Does anyone make a reliable drive now? (Score:4, Insightful)
there's just no refuting the theory that there are 4 good hard drive
engineers on the planet, and they move en mass from company
to company. the trick is switching brand about 2 years after the
switch. then you have about a 2 year window to find a new supplier.
Re:My 2TB hard drive is so big... (Score:4, Insightful)
You and others are completely missing his point. He's not saying you *can't* find stuff to fill a 3TB drive, but that 3TB is now overkill for most people. Even 500GB is far more than most people use.
There was once a time when no matter how much storage you had, an average person would *need* more. Then it became the average person would *want* more. Now the average person has more than enough space.
That doesn't mean there are those with above average storage requirements. They are generally "hoarders" and/or AV pros or enthusiast. But now, as you are saying, you have enough space for all the video and audio you want, you are now moving onto compressing them less. At some point computer storage will be so vast you will be able to store raw, uncompressed data, assuming storage continues to increase sufficiently to do so.
But for most people? They're already well served by their current drives. They aren't storing TV shows and movies, but as cloud services like Netflix and Hulu mature, and new entrants to the cloud like the rumored iTunes service arrive, these people may never feel the need to store non-personal media locally.