Droboman expects a 3TB drive from somewhere soon

Dr Geoff Barrall, founder and CEO of Drobo gave out his opinion in London last week that there should be a 3TB drive for Drobos by April next year. He didn't name the supplier, but Drobo does use Western Digital drives, so this 3TB drive could be a black one. Currently Western Digital offers a 2TB Caviar Black 3.5-inch SATA …

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Or they just add a fifth platter.

Maybe they just have a five platter drive, sacrificing heat and noise (or rather, energy efficiency and silence) for capacity.

[N2]

3Tb?

Hmm, lots more stuff to loose when the 'proprietary algorithm' that Drobo uses decides to throw a spanner in the works

[Pete Dixon]

Give me USB 3 or give me death

USB3 would be a huge boost for Drobo. I don't think it can come soon enough.

[Winkypop]

Hey!

Bags I the first iTerraPod !

[James O'Brien]

@Or they just add a fifth platter.

That would only equal ==2.5Tb not 3 bro. So if they took that approach then we are talking a 6 platter drive which I do not think would fit inside of todays drive housings.

[Andy 70]

bring back 5.25" drives for an easy win.

got a stack load of 5.25" drive bays that arn't being used...

[Dick Emery]

2TB limit?

Doesn't XP have a problem with more than 2TB drives (Unless mapped like a RAID on NAS etc)?

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@James O'Brien

[Or they just add a fifth platter] and gain the remaining 500GBytes by increasing areal density just a little to something already in use at WD.

Maybe I should have finished the sentecne, but I expected this to be obvious.

6Platter drives definitly won´t fit. Also haven´t seen one of these for quite a while... 3,5" double height, had some 18GB seagate UWSCSI drives back then...

[jaime]

cannot start Windows Vista when larger than 2 terabytes

You have a good point there sir.

I expect there to be quite a few headaches when drives larger than 2TB are introduced since there are various limitations that need to be worked around if you are using Windows.

XP cannot even boot from them unless you are on Itanium.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx

With Vista you need to have SP1 or later installed and need to be running the 64-bit version:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946557

Personally, owning a 2TB drive I wouldn't be in a rush to get a 3TB since I've already had it fail on me and had to RMA. Looks like they need to work on improving the quality at these higher densities first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Noooo, don't do it.

Drobo. n) Slow disk device prone to disappearing and/or losing data

Don't do it people. I truly wish I never had. Even for a USB2 device it's slow, when it chooses to show up at all. And when you realise how bad it is, how long will it take you to remove all that data and secure it?

a/c 'cos I'm putting mine on fleabay.

Paris, 'cos she loses stuff in her box all the time I'm sure.

[Kebabbert]

Too big drives

A modern drive has 30% of it's surface dedicated to error correction code, and still there will be errors that can not be repaired or even detected. If you read specs on a new drive, you will see something like "1 irrecoverable error in 10^14 bits". With yesterdays small drives, you didnt read to many bits to reach 10^14 of them, and hence hit an irrecoverable error. Todays large large raids, with much higher bandwidth, you will frequently hit irrecoverable errors. The error rate has been constant throughout the years, but the capacity has increased much more.

What to do? Use error correcting ZFS which is designed to handle these kind of problems. CERN did some research on hardware raid, and they showed errors that h/w could not detect. ZFS would have detected this.