Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
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Thread: First 3TB HDDs released
Harrison 13:38 2nd December 2010
Even though SSD HDDs are starting to gain ground as fast and silent boot/system drives, they still can't compete with traditional spinning magnetic HDDs for capacity, or price per GB.

The latest HDD from Western Digital is the Caviar Green 3TB with a 64MB cache. Initially this is costing £162 plus VAT, which is a lot when you consider a 1.5TB drive can now be bought for £46, so 2 of those totalling 3TB would be roughly half the price. And even worse, a Samsung 2TB drive can now be purchased with VAT for just £56, so you could get 4TB for just £112. Or twice the storage uing 3 TB drives for the same price; 6TB for £168. But for mass storage, a single drive is always nicer then 2 drives. And priced will definitely start to drop once they have been on the market for a while.

In review speed tests it seems pretty fast for a slow Green drive too, returning large file test results of 110MB/s and 169MB/s, which isn't as good as the Samsung F4 tests, which returned 138MB/s and 208MB/s. But it is still pretty fast, and more than enough for a media drive or general storage usage.

There is one downfall of a 3TB drive, and that is hardware and OS compatibility. Most existing NAS and media systems only support HDDs up to 2TB. And Another is that Windows can only boot from a disk larger than 2.19TB if you have a UEFI motherboard and a 64-bit OS. Such motherboards are very rare at the moment so these 3TB drives will mostly only be for secondary storage, and even then, a lot of motherboard SATA ports won't work with the drives and instead a special bundled PCI-E to SATA adapter will need to be used instead. In addition Windows XP doesn't support drives of this size at all, so only Vista/Win7 users can use them, plus recent Linux Distros. Also there are reports of compatibility issues with all 32bit OSs, so even 32bit versions of Vista and Win 7 could be effected.
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Demon Cleaner 14:13 2nd December 2010
Well finally. I was talking about this some days ago, I said that I wondered that there wasn't a lot happening lately considering HD capacity, that the 2TB drives are already for longer time on the market now, but not any news about bigger sized ones since quite some time.

The only thing that bothers me with bigger capacity disks, is that if they fail, there's really a huge amount of data lost, you obviously need to have 2 of them running, mirrored or in my case "manually vice-versa'd".

I would say that the speed is not that much important for these disks, at least not for me, mainly would use it like you mentioned as general storage or backup, wouldn't use a disk like that to boot from. Although with my 5 2TB disks I have, one is used to boot from. It's partitioned, 100GB is the system partition, the rest is storage. If I would buy a new PC now, I would definitely consider installing an SSD disk as system disk, albeit only a small one, like a 64GB, that's enough for a system partition, and the disks are affordable now, at the time I got my new PC (beginning of this year), they were still more expensive. And if one time I plan to do a fresh install, I would eventually get an SSD.
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Harrison 14:28 2nd December 2010
For me SSD's are stll too small for the OS boot drive. Specially for Vista/Win 7 as these OSs quickly start to eat up HDD space and will quickly run out of spare on a 100GB drive. The problem with Vista/Win 7 is updates. It stores all of them, with versions of each and every variation of each updated file. On my old Vista 64bit install it had eaten over 200GB of extra space just for these files, and you cannot delete them as it will damage the OS install. At the moment I have a faster 1TB Samsung HDD as the boot drive in my main PC, and some 2TB drives for data storage and video editing.

It is very true what you say about larger HDDs creating the danger of greater data lose. Normally for me the only files that remain on the HDDs permanently are rom/iso sets and these get mirrored between my download PC and my Emulation system, so like you I always have 2 copies of the files, on 2 separate systems. I'm personally still a bit paranoid about keeping 2 copies of files on 2 HDDs on the same system. It means both copies/disks are spinning all the time together, creating a greater chance of combined HDD failure. Also a PSU failure could take them both with it. It has always been a bit of a headache how to safely backup and store data/files and I think it always will be.

However, Blu-Ray writers are continuing to fall in price. Under £100 last time i looked, so 50GB BD-R disks are quickly becoming a viable backup media. Although the actual blank BD-R discs are still fairly expensive. But 50GB on each disk! It still amazes me.
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Demon Cleaner 16:27 2nd December 2010
Originally Posted by Harrison:
However, Blu-Ray writers are continuing to fall in price. Under £100 last time i looked, so 50GB BD-R disks are quickly becoming a viable backup media. Although the actual blank BD-R discs are still fairly expensive. But 50GB on each disk! It still amazes me.
That's true, that would be a great solution for "smaller" sets, let's say for 100GB files, you would only need 2 discs. But as most of the sets are still udated, you should be able to use rewritable media, which is only a bit more expensive.

Didn't know that Windows 7 is taking up that much space! So I guess my 100GB partition will come to its limits soon.
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Harrison 16:45 2nd December 2010
I haven't seen Win 7 using up HDD space as fast as Vista was, and M$ did say they had optimised it greatly, so maybe (hopefully) they actually fixed this issue and you will be OK. I currently have a 400GB partition for Win7 and its still got 319GB free, and that is with a lot of software installed, including the full Office 2010 and Adobe CS5 Master Collection, which consumes a far amount of space. But even so, that is still taking a total of 80GB up already in total. Might be worth you using a partitioning tool and increasing the size a bit just to be safe.
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Bloodwych 16:58 2nd December 2010
As mentioned in the past, I'm no data whore so 2TB is plenty for me from a drive.

I have two 1TB drives in my main PC and an external 640GB for backup. Nowhere near full, but I don't collect films or huge MAME CHD files. Nor do I bother with console ISO images.

Once we get blueray writers as the norm, I may start collecting more stuff and just burn it to 50GB optical disks for storage.
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Demon Cleaner 17:05 2nd December 2010
Originally Posted by Harrison:
Might be worth you using a partitioning tool and increasing the size a bit just to be safe.
I will do so when needed, at the moment I still have space free.

I just checked some reviews of BD burners, and the LG BH10LS seems to be very good according to some reviews. It's one of the cheapest also I found, you can get it already for 80£, I think I might buy one and replace it with my DVD burner.
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Harrison 17:07 2nd December 2010
The need for larger storage also goes hand in hand with internet connection speeds. With 56K dialup we were are quite happy with fairly small HDDs, but as soon as broadband arrived we all instantly needed large storage for the sudden collections of files we had access to. And if we ever get proper faster fibre connections we will suddenly all be faced with a lack of storage again!
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Bloodwych 17:08 2nd December 2010
Wow, Demon Cleaner - didn't realize they were getting down to that price. Saw Harrision mentioned they are now under £100, but it's getting into that mainstream zone now.

Do you know how much the media costs? I may have to get one too...
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Demon Cleaner 17:10 2nd December 2010
Just read that the LG BH12LS is due to come out soon and can burn rewritable BDs 12x and read 10x, whereas the LG BH10LS only burns 2x and reads 8x (rewritable discs). Don't know about a release date though.

Some prices I saw in an online shop:

BD-R 2x = 2.50€/disc
BD-R 4x = 3.50€/disc
BD-RE = 7.50€/disc
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