Seagate squeezes out 4TB desktop monster Seagate seems set to replace its desktop Barracuda brand with the Desktop HDD brand and introduce a 4TB desktop drive with it. The Desktop HDD 15 line runs up from 250GB through 320GB and 500GB all the way to 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB. It uses 1TB/platter technology, spins at 7,200rpm, has a 64MB cache, transfers data at up to …
My first hard drive was a 52MB SCSI effort for my Amiga.
It was £350 as I recall, circa 1991. I have used a PC/XT with a 5MB Hard drive though..
4TB for £150 is a bargain (although oddly I can only see this price for USB drives, the bare drive itself is more??!)
I suppose you would just buy the USB drive and pull it out of the case for a sata-III install.
:)
>I suppose you would just buy the USB drive and pull it out of the case for a sata-III install.
Be careful trying that these days. I have had at least one drive come to me for repair that had the USB3 connector built into the drive's electronics directly rather than the USB -> SATA adapter were all used to.
Makes some sense as a power-and-cost saving trick. The reason for SATA (and IDE before that) drives in USB enclosures has always been to take advantage of the economy of scale that comes from the big production lines. But with the increasing sales volume, it might make sense now for drive manufacturers to run a second line for USB-interfaced boards. They can keep the same mechanical side, after all: Same mechanics, different board attached.
My first was an Amiga 500 add-on drive. About 80MB I think. At the time (1990 ish) we had to drive almost 300 km to Toronto to get one. Pretty sure it was upwards of 800CAN$ (my dad bought it for me). 80MB was incredible to me back then, as such, it's pissing me off to no end that I'm downloading a 158MB(!) printer firmware update package right now.
My very first purchased drive was a seagate 10MB MFM drive, that's personal purchase not work.
after that it's just gotten insane.. as drive prices fall, i seem to gather more and more unused storage.. a nasty habit I intend to break. I'm around 35TB right now on my NAS.. and it's mostly empty.
"I suppose you would just buy the USB drive and pull it out of the case for a sata-III install."
Problematically, some vendors have been installing direct-USB controllers onto the drives. It's not USB->Interface->Controller in those cases. Unless they've backed off of that.
With that said, before the floods, I picked up a pair of "Aluratek" 1tb external USB hard drives for $40 each that were just hitachi SATA drives in a case. When those finally die I can slap another in there at least...
really? Amazon are selling the Hitachi 4tb Desk for £150 and the 4tb Pro for £175
They were selling for £140 only a few days earlier. £130 in January. And about £120 in the Christmas sale period. Incidentally, ebuyer have increased that "home" version of the hdd from £140 to about £165 or so in the last few days, if I remember correctly.
But hey, we're in the midst of a high flood season in Sahara, you know.
I remember when a 2TB drive cost £50 ... the prices haven't returned to normal since the floods even though the factories are back to full production. The competition commission absolutely should be looking into the prices and questioning why the Seagate/Samsung and WD/Hitachi mergers were allowed when that left just 3 huge companies to dominate the market which isn't in the interests of consumers or competition.
Of course you want to shell out a bit more for a 12 Gb/s 20.000 RPM SAS disc.
This baby will take 7 hours to copy in its entirety (probably longer than that), so it would stand just 1250 cycles a year, and won't last much longer than that. It holds 32 Terabit, so if the Bit Error Rate be 10^--13, that would be one error in just 30 cycles.
Don't know about the cutting edge as I'm on the bleeding edge most of the time ;)
The last half of my post, which El Reg's sparkly new app didn't post, said something along the lines of if the current prices had continued to be on a par with the pre-flood prices they would be a lot less expensive.
And that's after the fully insured companies have since made record profits.
What price for a shit-box hard drive with a 12 month warranty and a 12th month and one day expiry date?
Seagate drives are shit and so is their warranty.
4 Terror Bites of Seagate Drive = just more time wasted formatting it, more time wasted loading it up with more data, more time wasted trying to get it all backed up with it's starting to fail, and more time wasted buying and installing a new 4 Terror Bite hard drive - and after the 5th one in 3 years... switch to Hitachi Enterprise Quality.
Linux - Don't take no shit from them Microsoft Quality Drives.
Problem is that recovery would likely take out the remaining disk - copying 4TB at a sustained rate of ~100MB/s will take how long?
40,000 seconds ~ 12 hours of SOLID activity
Assuming a more realistic continuous rate it's going to take a long time to recover that data. I'd go for at least Raidz2, if not more...
I did this once, with an old Pentium that I had Linux on and had an awful lot of old hard drives in it for archive-access and each had at least four partitions on it.
Windows throws a fit, and won't name the drives after Z:, and Linux just adds more letters to the /dev/ entries. At least, that's how it worked years ago when I did that (think it was XP and early Linux 2.6). Hence, I was able to remove the problem by removing the Windows partitions present on the drives and saving myself several partition names for zero loss.
Yes, a quick Google says that still even as of Windows 8, you can mount as many NTFS drives as you like (NTFS allows all sorts of fancy mounting now) but if you want drive letters, you can still only go up to Z:. So, basically, if you want things to "just work", you can still only go to Z:. It won't crash and burn, but you'll have to play about if you actually want to use the data on them.
BTW: My post was wrong, apparently that machine was running a Linux 2.2 kernel. And still allowed more than 26 accessible drives / devices without anything "special" being done. Progress, eh?
Under Windows 2000 & later the DosDevices (aka drive letters) are merely references in the registry that point to the actual storage volume which could be an mbr partition, gpt partition or unpartitioned media like a USB stick or optical disc i.e. they are only shortcuts & are completely arbitrary as far as the OS is concerned.
Drive letters are only for backwards compatibility so the limit remains as it has since the DOS age (maybe since CP/M & QDOS):- 26 letters less the one used for the system drive.
Maximum partitions per drive would be a much more interesting question, I've found someone who has managed to create 350 partitions on a single drive inside a virtual machine but the actual maximum eludes me as this may be a limit of the diskpart command.
it's because their failure rate is so fucking high, not because people want MORE of them.
And yes,10 years down the line we will find out - MAYBE - that it was, indeed, an extreme case of "planned obsolescence", and they'll be fined 10 billion rubles (or rupees), of which every Seagate customer (US only) will be entitled to big mac voucher to the value of 10 bucks. And it'll be hailed as another case of "ultimate justice for the customer". Like shit.
I can only assume Seagate has learned the manufacturing ways of Western Digital then. I've pretty much got their RMA line on speed dial, and the banter with the rep is second nature now. "yup... yup... yes windlg failed it.. twice...here's my email..."
While Seagate has certainly had their problems and deserve all the grief they are getting presently, the situation is not nearly as dire as some of you would like to make it out to be. I have a pile of perfectly good old Seagate drives sitting on the shelf. They are not sitting there because they failed. They are sitting there because I needed more space and moved on to larger drives.
DOA is the biggest issue by far. Just buy from a nice reputable vendor with good return policies (like Amazon).
Back in the early naughties they did have another line they tried to sell as a more affordable version of the barracudas.. the real truth was they had abysmal failure rates, even for seagate, and the line was eventually ended. I remember getting a case of them for builds and all but one of the lot failed in burn in
And yes,10 years down the line we will find out - MAYBE - that it was, indeed, an extreme case of "planned obsolescence", and they'll be fined 10 billion rubles (or rupees), of which every Seagate customer (US only) will be entitled to big mac voucher to the value of 10 bucks. And it'll be hailed as another case of "ultimate justice for the customer".
Ah, but the legal types will get most of the money.
15 years from now we'll be shaking our heads at how much we had to pay for a 4 TB drive... oh wait, we already are.
Massive hard drives are great for back up - redundancy but for the average Joe they promote laziness. Also, the bigger the drive the greater the disaster when it fails or they muck up their PC. Having said that, I've experienced greater reliability out of Seagate than I've had with WD, Deskstar and the least dependable being Maxtor (which Seagate snapped up years ago). YMMV of course.
With two drive suppliers, one could be forgiven for fearing price gouging, but the reality is that, while prices haven't returned to the levels before the Thailand floods of two years ago, the prices are not outrageous. Further, with two vendors chasing a declining desktop PC market, and SSD coming into its own, there may be a price war brewing. Don't expect huge discounts...the margin today still isn't huge.
Yay...eventually some some drives to max out my Drobo at last. Not because I have to, but just because I want to. Even with my HD movie collection growing, 10-and-a-bit TB is a lot of storage.
And given Seagate's reputation, a chance to see just how good Drobo is at dealing with dead disks...
Interesting sidenote: a 4x4tb Drobo's index overhead requirements ( circa 18gb) is more than my first PC had in total storage. Progress ftw.
Some people like to record their online gaming session using FRAPS. A little snag is, the thing records raw uncompressed AVI after the graphic card produces the output, because it must save processing power for the gaming itself. As a result, 2 minutes of footage burn 500MB of storage. The software offers no option of compressing, only after the video is recorded that you can compress it.
4TB would be a hell of scratch-disk.
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