WD's 3TB Internal HDD Comes with PCI-e Card
Although Windows 7 and Vista can support capacities over 2.19 TB, a special PCI Express card will be bundled with the new 3 TB and 2.5 TB hard drives to overcome the hardware hurdle.
Tuesday Western Digital said that its 3 TB WD Caviar Green internal SATA HDD--slated as the world's largest thus far--is now available at select U.S. retailers and distributors. The drive will carry a $239 price tag and will be joined by an additional 2.5 TB model costing $189. Both will utilize 750 GB-per platter areal density and Advanced Format (AF) technology.
"WD Caviar Green drives are an eco-friendly storage solution with WD GreenPower Technology, which reduces power consumption by enabling lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and decreases acoustical noise for quiet operation," the company said Tuesday. "The WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB and 3 TB hard drives are designed for use as secondary external storage and next-generation PC storage in 64-bit-based systems."
The drawback to both capacities is that--on a hardware level--BIOS-based motherboards are limited, offering capacity support up to 2.19 TB. On the software front, 32-bit Windows operating systems prior to Vista share the same limitation, capable of handling 2.19 TB partitions or less thanks to their native support for the legacy Master Boot Record (MBR).
However MBR is expected to be replaced by the GUID Partition Table--which is already supported by Windows 7 and Vista--by the end of the year, and the BIOS will be replaced by the new Extensive Firmware Interface (EFI)--both of which will handle capacities over 2.19 TB. But that doesn't help current consumers wanting to take advantage of the expanded storage space.
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.
Unfortunately, even if installed on a machine with a EFI-embedded motherboard, Windows XP machines can't use either drive because the OS offers native support for MBR only.
Well, it's not going to be 3TB of really, really important text documents, is it? 99% porn and you know it.
Also...is anyone else worried about so much information on one disk? Yes, I'm a fan of RAID and backup, but 3TB seems like so much data.
I can still remember...(I'm sure we'll get plenty of comments - floppy disks, punch cards, MB of storage, etc)
Also...is anyone else worried about so much information on one disk? Yes, I'm a fan of RAID and backup, but 3TB seems like so much data.
I can still remember...(I'm sure we'll get plenty of comments - floppy disks, punch cards, MB of storage, etc)
If I build a new PC in 2011, and I want a lot of disk space, I must look for a motherboard with EFI, get Windows 7 64-bit, and then I can use these 3 TB disks without needing HBA cards?
What if I want to add 6 of these new disks to my current machine? Would I need 6 HBA cards? I don't have PCI-E slots for all of them. Does one HBA card support multiple drives?
There's a more detailed review here
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_3tb_review_wd30ezrsdtl
Personally I don't think it is so much about the amouont of data being stored as it is the size of data being stored with many people using these drives to rip full size DVDs, BluRays, etc... along with Video and Image editing advancing and also taking up huge amounts of digital space. I doubt anyone is storing 10m+ text documents.
Well, it's not going to be 3TB of really, really important text documents, is it? 99% porn and you know it.
I don't understand your concern. If you are going to RAID Mirror then why does it matter about the size of the disk? I could understand a concern if you were using a RAID Stripe.
I know what you mean. And they're close to maxed out yet. I read an article last year that was talking about using laser diodes in the hard drives to heat the surface of the platter at write time in order to further increase the data density. They indicated that storage capacities could be increased by as much as 10 times!
I do understand the concern of having so much data on a single disk though. Losing all of the data stored on a 250GB drive sucked, I imagine 4,000GB would be hell.
I hope they're not only working on performance and density, but also reliability (which is, arguably, the most important feature). I can only fit so many drives into a single system (easily), I don't want to use a RAID 60...
If you are using a 3tb for recording tele then small errors or even loosing the all the data is not the worst thing ever. With an HD media center pc the more space the better. Shame I can't get this in XP (32 bit) though.