Western Digital releases first 3TB internal 3.5" hard drive

[saint19]

Western Digital has announced today that their Caviar Green line of hard drives will now include 2.5 terabyte and 3 terabyte 5400RPM drives; the largest single internal drive in the industry. The 3TB drives will have four platters at 750GB a piece and both drives feature Western Digital’s GreenPower Technology, which lowers power consumption, noise, and temperatures for increased reliability and comfort in operation

Source

Do u want one?

Pre-order here

 

[sminlal]

I'm glad to see HDD sizes finally start to progress again. I hope they don't get a flood of returns from people who try to use these as boot drives on systems that don't support GUID partitions and don't know how to make it work - I've always suspected that's what's been holding the drive manufacturers back.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I'm glad to see HDD sizes finally start to progress again. I hope they don't get a flood of returns from people who try to use these as boot drives on systems that don't support GUID partitions and don't know how to make it work - I've always suspected that's what's been holding the drive manufacturers back.

Well, the drives come with a PCIe card, so that should be their first clue that not all systems will support these large drives.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/HDD-3TB-Host-Bus-Adapter-SATA,11494.html

 

[saint19]

^Ohhh, just two minutes after that I posted here :lol:

 

[sminlal]

Well, the drives come with a PCIe card, so that should be their first clue that not all systems will support these large drives.

To help overcome the current hardware and software limitations, WD is bundling the two drives with a PCI Express-based Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA) card which will enable the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 to use a known driver with correct support for large capacity drives.

I wonder what the heck they mean by that? Vista and Windows 7 already support large capacity drives, the issue is getting them booted without an EFI motherboard. So what exactly does this PCI card do? It must be more than just a SATA adapter...

 

[saint19]

The drive is a 5400 rmp drive so I think that the performance isn't the best and I think that the PCI is more for avoid problems that for other thing.

 

[Hawkeye22]

To help overcome the current hardware and software limitations, WD is bundling the two drives with a PCI Express-based Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA) card which will enable the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 to use a known driver with correct support for large capacity drives.

I wonder what the heck they mean by that? Vista and Windows 7 already support large capacity drives, the issue is getting them booted without an EFI motherboard. So what exactly does this PCI card do? It must be more than just a SATA adapter...

Yeah, I thought the same thing. The only thing I could figure is the card is to let you know you can't use a GPT disk as a boot drive without an EFI board. Perhaps the controller won't show up in the bios's boot order list, thus not allowing you to select this drive as bootable... or as saint19 said, to avoid confusion.

 

[sminlal]

Anandtech has a pretty good discussion of the new WD drive here. It looks like the reason you need the controller card is because the current ICH chipset (or maybe it's just the chipset drivers?) doesn't support 64-bit LBAs. I find that pretty d@mn disappointing - how is it that Intel can do so well on it's CPUs and so bloody poorly with it's chipsets?

 

[Hawkeye22]

That is a bummer. Guess I'll be holding off on the 3Tb drives until they have that worked out.

 

[sminlal]

Well to be fair the specific problem with the 3TB drives that requires the use of a separate controller isn't a drive issue, it's a motherboard chipset/driver issue.