3TB Hard Drive Round Up 238
MojoKid writes "When 3TB hard drives first arrived compatible motherboards with newer UEFI setup utilities weren't quite ready for prime time. However, with the latest Intel and AMD chipsets hitting the market, UEFI has become commonplace and compatibility with 3TB drives is no longer an issue... A detailed look at four of the latest 3TB drives to hit the market from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital shows ... there are some distinct differences between them. Performance-wise, Seagate's Barracuda XT 3TB drive seems to be the current leader but other, slightly less expensive drives, come close."
750,000 hours MTBF. (Score:3)
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If you bought 3 1TB seagate, you'd be 3x as likely to suffer a failure. So that's really more like a 400,000 hour MTBF for 3TB worth of space.
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I break in to your house and steal your Drobo, then what?
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you get shot?
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I actually did quite thorough review of NAS/Backup boxes for home use and in the end decided to build one myself. Now I have a 4TB Ubuntu box with plenty of room to expand and connectivity and what's most important: total control of the system. The passively cooled mini-itx board and the case supports 6 sata III drives besides having eSata and USB 3.0, the OS launches from a small SSD. Raid is something that many people automatically implement even though it's not always necessary or convenient. I simply rs
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I first tried FreeNAS before installing Ubuntu, and ZFS was a natural choice (for the 2TB drives). I didn't want to use the SSD as a cache for ZFS so decided to install Ubuntu on it rather than having an unused HD. The SSD has the default Linux filesystem. I found a great ZFS driver, which doubled the disk to disk transfer rate from fuse-ZFS.
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Pony up. I need to transition off of fuse-ZFS. Is it ZFS on Linux? I've been waiting forever for it to exit beta, but mostly just not having time to experiment.
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Yes it is (http://zfsonlinux.org/). I installed it from Darik Horn's PPA as instructed in the FAQ. I don't know how fast the disks should optimally be (100 MB/s reads from single disk, WD Caviar Green), but disk to disk rate peaks and goes a bit above 60 MB/s compared to 30 MB/s before. Average is somewhere a bit above 40 MB/s.
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That is an improvement. I tend to attribute the slowdown compared to the 100MB/s to filesystem overhead. Particularly in my case b/c I'm generally writing over gigabit from OS X via a netatalk AFP share. But even as-is, I tend to get above 30MB/s to a single-disk ZFS pool on ZFSfuse. I would love to see that jump to 50-60MB/s, which I would have to consider best-case reading/writing over a single gigabit link from OS X from a single laptop HD.
I have seriously considered switching from Ubuntu to Fedora h
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The FreeNAS people recommend at least 6 Gigabytes of memory for a system of my size, and when I do a large copy (about 100 GB OSX Image) it actually takes that much and reaches the top speed. The CPU cores hit 100% (the board Asus E35M1-I Deluxe, with AMD Fusion). If you have a large setup the extra memory will likely contribute to the transfer rate. I checked out the other NAS OS's but I like Ubuntu for the versatility. It's probably possible to have yet another performance boost by having a more optimized
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Huh... how fast is your network?
That 6 GB figure for RAM seems a bit excessive (although with cheap RAM prices, probably no big deal). I'm running a 4x1TB ZFS on OpenSolaris and it hits Gigabit Ethernet speed with 2 GB RAM (not actually sure it's even using all that).
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I was benchmarking internal disk to disk transfers, and the system really took a bit over 6 Gigabytes. The memory usage pattern was somewhat of interest, as it ramped up for some time until releasing, and the cycle was restarted. The default of ZFS seems to be that all of the system memory is used except 1GB: http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#Memory_and_Dynamic_Reconfiguration_Recommendations [solarisinternals.com]
From Freenas Hardware reqs: "The best way to get the most out of your FreeNAS h
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Important note was left out from the FreenNAS Hardware reqs:
NOTE: by default, ZFS disables pre-fetching (caching) for systems containing less than 4 GB of usable RAM. Not using pre-fetching can really slow down performance. 4 GB of usable RAM is not the same thing as 4 GB of installed RAM as the operating system resides in RAM. This means that the practical pre-fetching threshhold is 6 GB, or 8 GB of installed RAM. You can still use ZFS with less RAM, but performance will be affected.
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You're using ZFS and manually managing backups with rsync? That's ass backwards.
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I understand ZFS is mostly for RAID's then? Most probably I'm not doing things as they should be done, but I like ZFS and originally thought of using FreeNAS, which recommends ZFS anyway. I'll probably check back to it when the new version matures a bit. I'm not after meticulous performance tweaking though. It's just great to have a back-up system rather than a single back-up drive (most of my data is practically triple secured).
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Yes, ZFS is so RAID centric that it has it's own designation RAID-Z.
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Unless you're using a Drobo to store backups, keeping your only source of data on a Drobo is not a backup. To be clear, RAID is *NOT* a backup. It's redundancy. There is a difference.
Not sure why you've changed the subject to bang on about backups... he was talking about protecting from hardware failures. Which is exactly what RAID does.
Re:750,000 hours MTBF. (Score:4, Informative)
Utter nonsense. If one drive failing caused the next to fail, then millions would not be using RAID as the defacto method of redundancy. I've had many, many RAID setups for many years (ie: every server and workstation for almost 20 years), and had the occasional drive failure. I've never had two drives fail in the same array. Ever. And that was with both hardware and software RAID setups. Drives fail due to manufacturing flaws, even minor ones that don't show up for a long time. You overstate the ability of manufacturers to create multiple products exactly the same. They may be built to the same minimum STANDARD, but that isn't the same as being IDENTICAL.
Sorry, but this is bullocks and if someone told you this, they were pulling your leg. This guarantees nothing, except that your array will likely perform like crap because they will all have different latency, as well as sustained and burst throughput. This would be most noticeable in a software RAID, and slow the whole system down. The entire purpose of a RAID is to use identical drives in size, performance and specifications so the entire array, regardless of RAID type, will seamlessly act like a single drive, while using the least amount of overhead.
Try a different subject matter, you are seriously missing some information about this one.
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Wow, you must be one lucky storage admin. After having whole batches of drives fail within hours of eachother, I'm also assembling all my raids that hold even slightly important data strictly with different disks from different manufacturers. Afterall, having fast access to data is less important than having an access at all.
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Reading comprehension FAIL. I did NOT say anything of the sort. I said that if you have ten nearly identical pieces of hardware and treat them in nearly identical ways, you'd have to be crazy to expect them to fail at significantly different times. Any claim to the contrary is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.
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I hope you do not want any performance. Mixing drives even firmwares can send your iops through the floor. For a bulk storage that's reliable this is fine don't try and get any performance out of it.
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Yup. It's a tradeoff. Performance or robustness. If you want your RAID to provide significantly increased robustness, you have to compromise performance (and, in particular, cache performance).
You should be able to eliminate much of this difference by adding appropriate amounts of caching at the RAID controller level or in the computer itself, though latency for longer reads will suffer by some portion of one short-seek/settle period and one rotation because of the increased probability of one or more dr
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The redundant information is to protect against loss of your working set. It is operational data when on a RAID array.
A backup is a copy of data that is not a working set. Ergo, RAID is not a backup.
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Even the 750k MTBF feels bogus. In my experience actual failure rate is just a hair under 3%, which works out to about 300k MTBF. Maybe they're quoting the MTBF of a drive still in its anti-static bag, sitting in the spares drawer :)
Try shoving 36 3TB drives in one of these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-R1400LP.cfm [supermicro.com] and you'll appreciate MTBF in a whole new light. My approach is simple: I take the number of drives, times 3% annual failure, times the number of years I want to
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You misspelled "single manufacturing batch of drives".
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The problem is that a hard drive "batch" isn't really a batch at all, it's an entire production run from any particular facility. Typically, once you break into a new "batch", the drives have other differences like a cost-reduced controller or different platter density, that makes it unsuitable for integration with the existing array.
The most defining indicator I've seen for hard drives is simply its inception date. If you take a bunch of drives, start pounding them in a RAID simultaneously, they are a li
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That's the right way to do it you don't want to deal with field service.
And 3% sounds perfectly reasonable for the consumer channel remembering my hard drive days. You only get to 1 or 2% in a tightly controlled OEM environment with mature (aka obsolete) technology. That's why enterprise storage vendors are always 1 or 2 generations behind the bleeding edge. We're just now qualifying 2TB drives.
Re:750,000 hours MTBF. (Score:4, Funny)
I've got 3 1TB Barracudas. Actually I can't remember the last time I had an HD failure, although I have noticed that heavy loading (through bit torrent, for example) does make them start to emit strange clunking noises after a while! But overall I would consider them a trusted brand because I've never had one fail, personally.
Those 'strange clunking noises' are actually hardware viruses chewing on the shell of the drive and trying to get out. Best to spray some Clorox mixed with WD-40 all over everything and let it sit for a while. That should quiet things down a bit.
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It must be nice to have an OC-48 coming into your basement to drive those three drives to a "heavy load" condition via bit torrent.
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I keep on top of the SMART status of my drives and don't wait for them to implode before taking them off line.
While I haven't had any "failures" as such with my 1.5TB and larger Seagates, I have pre-emptively removed a few from active use before they could be a bother.
Seagate (Score:2)
I have one of the Seagate 7200.11 drives I bought in Sept 2009 that had the firmware issue at launch. Never experienced any problem with it myself, always passed all tests, and SMART status was great. Night before last, it disappeared under Windows. I shut down, checked the cables, rebooted and...failed SMART on boot. I should have done some more testing then, but I rebooted to run a disk scanner (Ultimate Boot CD - hightly recommend keeping a burn around) and it stopped being detected by bios. That quick -
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1.That's what backups are for.
2. I think that Seagate will fix it for you so that the data is recovered.
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Total lie. Most HDD's will fail around 3 years, so ~26,000 hours.
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>Total lie
My hdd still running since 1997 would prove you wrong....although I do not have much on it as it is a small hdd (250gb),
it would still outlast any of the devices today......
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The Seagate drive from my first PC lasted 7 years before I discarded.
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Just keep your receipt; Seagate is giving you a 5 year warranty on the 3TB drives.
I have lots of hard drives here which are 4+ years old, I have only had one fail in the past year. I'm sure the oldest drive that's still working here is 8+ years old, and there were lots more that just got cycled out.
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I don't give anyone my failed HD's... it's a privacy thing.
MTBF are fictitious figures. They mean nothing.
Hard drive warranties are irrelevant. They mean nothing.
Warranties do not imply quality. Seems like they might but... they don't.
My Seagates fail faithfully after around 30,000 hours. I track 'em so I know.
WD's fail... Hitachi's fail... they all fail if you use them long enough.
Working 8-year old hard drives can be the basis for an amusing anecdote, one of those "ain't that the dangest thing" sort of st
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I just dealt with a failed drive last night. The drive was a 26-year-old NEC D5124.
Hows THAT for TBF?
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...or you could just buy twice as many drives and still spend less.
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*(Though I do remember somebody saying that extreme amounts of time between use will actually cause harm to the disk the next time it's used)
That's not what MTBF "means" (Score:2)
Pun intended. Mean time between failure, it's only the mean, statistics. In the real world, it's quite normal to run drives with over a million hours MTBF and have a couple percent of them fail each year.
MTBF is really only helpful when you're running a bunch of drives and need to calculate projected time and money you'll spend replacing them. It has no real application to one drive's life expectancy.
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Between two drives, one with 750,000 hour MTBF and one with 75,000 hour MTBF, which would you choose for one or 2 drives? The MTBF isn't exactly predictive of your drives' lifespans, but it definitely has real application to the decision about which drives to buy...
Here's an example (Score:3)
http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html [usenix.org]
Scroll down to the table and see for example a 1 million hour MTBF drive with a real-world annual replacement rate (how many die every year) one-sixth that of a 1.5 million MTBF drive.
Re:750,000 hours MTBF. (Score:4, Funny)
(750 000 / 24) / 365.25 = 85.5578371 years
Whats the problem?
The problem is that HDD manufacturers don't tell you that all their MTBF ratings are actually specified in "dog hours".
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First off as someone who has a Seagate manufacturing facility close by
you do not want to buy their drives. I'd buy Western Digital or some
company that doesn't use temp workers for their consumer drives.
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Well, if Seagate is really using temp workers for their consumer HDDs, I suspect their read and write speeds would be horribly slow.
Not to mention possibly illegal?
Why the comment on the capacity (Score:5, Informative)
For every drive they comment that the drives have a 2.72TB capacity reported in windows. Why is this surprising them so much? Everyone knows that Windows misreports TiB as TB. Given that all these drives are advertised as 3TB, and 3TB is equal to 2.728TiB it's hardly surprising the capacity that windows reports, is it?
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Also do not miss the fact the drives have throughput topping 160TB per second. These drives are fast. o_O
http://hothardware.com/articleimages/Item1712/3tb_roundup_atto_read.png [hothardware.com]
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160GB/s, but yeh, still rather off the chart ;)
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160GB/s, but yeh, still rather off the chart ;)
160MB/s? ;)
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Uh, no; "everyone*" knows that hard drive manufacturers, computer manufacturers, and resellers misrepresent TiB as TB, and in the rare cases they do disclose it in advertising or on the outside packaging, it is in 3- or 4-point fine print in a low-contrast color and written in a very technical manner that may as well come across as greek to a nontechnical person, or will refer the user to a web site.
Windows reports the traditionally-accepted units to the e
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I say print 'em all. Let God sort it out.
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Google is getting it wrong. 1 Mega byte is equal to 1000 kilo bytes, which is equal to 1000000 bytes. 1 Mebi byte is equal to 1024 kibi bytes, which is equal to 1048576 bytes. These are agreed standards by the IEEE, ISO and IEC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte [wikipedia.org]
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Way to complex.
For us American consumers, I would suggest
Small
Medium
Large
XXL
XXXL
Oprah Winfrey
None of this mathy stuff.
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You have to plan for the future.
What's beyond Oprah Winfrey? And what happens if she shrinks? Is that data loss? Is it recoverable or reusable?
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OMG, what will we do if the Library of Congress burns down! Or -- traveling backward in time -- all the gold transmutes!
-l
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She shrunk once before during the "Oprah Diet".
Somehow we all survived that. Later, she seemed to recover all the loss just fine... and then some.
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They can say whatever they want, but even today I'd never even heard of a 'mebibyte' and I have both a degree in comp sci and I've been in IT for over a decade. In fact I'm currently working for a college whose comp sci program doesn't once mention medbibytes anywhere. You ranting about how 'MB' doesn't mean what most of the world was taught seems to mean a whole lot of nothing.
Personally 'way back' in 1996 when I went to college mebibytes didn't exist and we were taught 1 KB (kilobytes) = 1024 bytes. Every
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Because most people think the attempt to change the accepted definition of terabyte is retarded. Rather like Slashdot's posting interface.
This comment will not be saved until you click the Submit button below.You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
The time-delay isn't that bad. What's really retarded is how every time you click inside the comment window, instead of simply placing the cursor where you clicked, it has to unnest another level of comments above. It's imp
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Why does Slashdot do this?
Because the guys who did the last redesign thought that using javascript was a good idea but weren't experienced enough to realize adding complexity adds bugs.
Turn off javascript and you won't have that problem. At slashdot, if it works without javascript then it works better without javascript.
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Back when I was in school, the propaganda was always that SI units were better because they made more sense in terms of computation being simple base 10 things rather than being halves and thirds and whatnot. SI Units weren't meant to be some sort of alternate regal decree.
All of your droning on is essentially to declare that the new way of doing things is just another form of regal decree.
Forget about whether or not the units make sense, or are useful, or are convenient.
Just enforce the regal decree.
Yeah.
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I would expect you to know how software works and how computers count vs. how people count. This is especially true when the subject of "what is a kilobyte" is discussed in the very first introductory computer classes one would take.
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Binary Gigabyte would have been so nice and descriptive and simple and would have not looked so goofy that no one would want to ever use it.
Of course it was also far to obvious and simple. The beaurocrats that like to try and control these things can't have simple and obvious. It would make far too much sense and lessen the need for more beaurocrats.
Una Pagina (Score:2)
Graphed speeds are wrong? (Score:3)
Am I reading the graphs wrong, or are they claiming 160,000MB/s throughput on those drives?
Is that supposed to be KB/s? I might buy 160MB/s (that's still crazy high), but 160GB?
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Burst throughput from the drive itself still can not surpass SATA throughput, and even SATA-3 is not *that* fast.
I don't trust my data to a single huge drive (Score:2)
Sure, a single external drive for backups is one thing but for everyday use I prefer to use RAID-5 or RAID-Z. Sure it's anecdotal but it just seems to me that newer drives fail more often than older ones. Not to mention that losing all the data on a 3 TB disk is a bit worse than losing all the data on a 540 MB or even 9 GB disk was. Sure I had important data on those as well, but it was easier to keep the most important stuff backed up properly.
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The idea of a rational backup strategy is that you don't lose data, no matter what size drive you are using. So if you're worried about a 3TB drive failing, you're doing it wrong.
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The rational backup strategy for my movie collection *is* a RAID-1. One of which has actually failed (Samsung 2GB) so I have to replace it *quick*. It's not 100 safe or anything, but it's a balanced decission in my opinion.
Documents are stored on my SSD, my RAID and online, but I don't need 3 GB for that anyway.
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And that's fine. But backup strategy shouldn't be based on 'ooh, that drive is too big to fail'. That IS what RAID is for, after all.
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The claims that newer drives are more error prone is a fallacy, resulting from a failure to understand basic statistics. These are people who in the past have bought one, maybe two hard drives, but now they have several OS drives on several computers, plus several more for bulk storage, portable storage, etc. When you have five times the number of drives, you are five times more likely to suffer a failure in one of them. People are experiencing more failures, because there is more to fail, and they are i
BIOS doesn't recognize my drive (Score:2)
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For us old foggies what we did is read the drive parameters off the drive
and then manually enter them.
Then if the controller could not address all the space we used
what was called a drive overlay software usually provided
by the manufacture, that should get you up and running
but back in the day drive compression software could cause
serious issues with drives built with a drive overlay.
Also data recovery get more than just a little tricky.
If the bios can't autodetect the drive that is your most likely
path to
Not big enough (Score:2)
How about external HDDs? (Score:2)
Do 3 TB exist and are reliable?
3 TB? Pshaw! (Score:2)
4TB [seagate.com] is where it's at!
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Right now if you've got the $$$. Don't expect to find it at Newegg, tho.
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If they're doing realtime video or multitrack audio, then they can probably afford the faster drive.
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The speed of high capacity drives can matter a great deal depending on what the system is used for, and read/write speed is not just important for applications and the OS. Ask anyone who does realtime uncompressed video or multi-track audio recording.
Yes, but.... as the capacity of a platter increases without increasing the size, the rpm needed to obtain a set transfer rate goes down. It's basic math... when the bit density increases, the read head has to cover less area to pick up the same number of bits. That's not to say that a 7200rpm 3TB drive will not be faster than a 5400rpm 3TB drive, but it does mean that the difference between the two won't be as significant as a 7200rpm 80GB drive versus a 5400rpm 80GB drive, as the transfer will run into oth
Very bad experience with the Hitachi (Score:2)
it makes more sense to pay $129 for a 3TB 5400 RPM drive such as this Hitachi:
I had a really bad experience with this hitachi (not the more expensive one mentioned in the article). I ordered one and started synchronizing a 2TB drive onto this one.
At first everything worked well, but after the first 1TB or so it started to slow down. I re-started the transfer from the middle, but after 10 hours it had only transferred 100GB!
I bought the Seagate 3TB drives and that seems to be working much better (in that a
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Not so much.
http://9to5mac.com/2011/09/06/seagate-announces-industrys-first-4tb-hard-drive/ [9to5mac.com]
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I backup onto 500 gig 2.5inch drives.
They are fairly cheap/gig and take less physical space than an equivalent stack of DVDs.
Important stuff is on a RAID1 of three 300 gig drives, and two 2TB drives (also backed up) less important stuff is backed up, but only on one disk in a JBOD collection.
If a JBOD drive fails, inconvenient, but that's all.
-nB
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I have rounded up the best 3TB Hard Drives in my pants!
That's odd, some girl just told me that you had a 3 1/2" floppy.
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Windows Vista 64-bit since SP1, Windows 7 64-bit (32-bit versions are SOL), and Server 2008 support UEFI/GPT.