Hardware Are we Ready for 3TB Hard Disks?

3TB hard disks will cause a PC revolution, with new BIOSes and operating systems - are you ready?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/06/01/are-we-ready-for-3tb-hard-disks/1

 

Welcome to Land of Acronyms (LoA)!

Wow, with 3TB you could store every Lolcat on the internet...! Can't think of another use for it except downloading films.

p.s. "Stop! HAMR time..."

*snigger* very good!

 

Interesting. I never realised going over 2TB was so reliant on so many different things.

 

I can't wait! At the moment the smallest HDD in my PC is 1.5TB (of 7 HDDs) so I'm always keen to get the most space out of each SATA port.

Obviously your motherboard needs to support the hard drive but I don't see why booting is such a big deal. Larger HDDs take longer to access so booting off one would be painful. Ideally you would boot off a SSD and use several 3TB drives in RAID for mass storage.

 

surely there are better aproaches

 

Flip off the top?

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Besides, 3TB sounds small when you look at the figures from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte

 

Interesting read.

 

well, lets reassess:

4K sectors....................DONE!
GUID Partition Table...DONE!
UEFI...............................ALMOST DONE!

So using 3TB disks purely for storage is no issue today. Just install a proper OS.
As for booting? A non issue for me as I would never use a 3TB disk for booting.

Also you can boot from GPT disks even on a BIOS system. You just need a hybrid MBR/GPT disk and a bootloader that supports it.

 

Interesting but a bit one sided view. There are a lot of users who have both a 64bit OS and EFI motherboard.

All Apple computers now come with both. So I am looking forward to 4TB disk in 2010. And if you are still using Windows XP 32bit or hang on to the old fashioned BIOS its YOU who are holding back development not the industry.

What do you think of this?

And yes I know this is not an Apple fan site.

 

Wow you can fit a windows 7 install on 3Gb? Please tell me how

Kimbie

 

meh, hardly any need now that porn can be so easily streamed...

 

3TB seems an awful lot of data to lose when and if the drive ever fails saying that though I said the same thing about the 2TB

 

megavideo account anyone?

 

I did the math on rebuilding RAID5 arrays from large hard drives for a storage project a couple of years ago. The error rates quoted by manufacturers, combined with the huge data storage volumes of modern disks compared with their counterparts when the RAID levels were defined, meant it was unsafe to rely on even a RAID6 with 8 drives to be able to successfully rebuild a failed disk without further errors cropping up if the disks were larger than 1TB. Looks like it won't be long until even single drives will be likely to suffer unrecoverable errors before you even fill them up. New tech pls!

 

so buy 2 and backup?...

 

3TB is a lot to lose, but a couple of those drives in RAID1 could be a decent way of storing a lot of data without needing loads of drives/space. Or one in a small HTPC; 3TB is a fair number of films even at high resolutions.

 

Guys. You have EUFI everywhere in the article.
Page 3: title and picture 2 text
Page 4: picture 2 text
Change that to UEFI maybe?

 

so it's only an issue for booting, who in their right mind would only buy one single largest hard drive commercially available without a SSD?

SSD should be compulsory for new computers these days.

 

It's obvious that we'll need HDDs of such size for new Windows OS eventually...

 

Nice. Cant wait to get this, 3TB will probably be 75% full by two months.