Harddrives to Hit 3TB Capacities By November

How many movies can be stored on a 3TB drive? Are 3TB hard drives aimed at the home theater market or commercial data storage? I'm having a hard drive imagining the massive storage capabilities.

i cannot wait to get a 3TB drive for 99 bucks lol. i would love to get one of these for my PVR

I love the photo. Is that a 10 MByte drive from the early 80's, maybe with an 8 inch platter?

They'll certainly find a market in enterprise use, still the largest market for hardware. And I can imagine that workstations and certain home theater PC's could use that much storage.

And to reply to the question in the article: I don't think magnetic storage is dying just yet. It will have a massive pricing advantage for years to come and capacity is still far ahead. The best SSD's manage 1TB, but are nearly unaffordable. Meanwhile, dirt cheap 3TB drives are being prepared...

SSD's are great as a boot drive, maybe as a primary drive in higher end systems in a few years time, but I think that it will be at least a year or 3 before magnetic storage will start dying.

its not soon enough!

ummm yea home theater use, still not big enough. i have a 0+1 that stores 13gb and 12 of it is full soooo

Yep... It will take some years until ssd's can compete with prize... After that, it will be bye bye to mechanical drives, but in the mean time the storage kings are going to be old fashioned mechanical drives.

I agree with you entirely! In fact, maybe even 3 years is a very optimistic prediction given that magnetic hard drives make perfect sense for regular media storage. SSD could (and should) be used as the system drive, but why not have 8TB (in 3 years?) of magnetic hard drive for movies, music and general documents. I am sure that SSDs won't be quite on the cheap side 3 years from now. I'd say by 2015 or so, SSDs will be common place though.

One word: HD pr0n

I know for a fact that my 2TB is actually full from my game collection. Adding another 3TB to my system will definitly allow me to install the rest of my collection.

I have 4 1 TB system, and it is getting filled up, if you rips everything that comes your way due to physical disk fails, you would know the feeling

granted I should really raid 5 this, but hardware raid 5s are expensive...

that's good, finding space for my 1080p pron collection was getting to be a hassle.8GB+\movie.

Especial BluRays from the renta... You know what I mean.

I have a 4.5GB RAID JOBD (3x 1.5GB) and its getting filled quite fast at 47GB per file.

In fact I think both will die in favor of hybrid drives and not so large SSD. Common users don't use lot of hard drive space. Look at your mom. Mine use about only half a gig for its personnal usage. Still I had to buy a 80gig HD because there wasn't anything smaller that made sense. Now, if you look at a geek usage of its HD, most people will only use a small part of their data each day. That's why the hybrid drives should provide a greater experience. The most used data could be cached on the flash drive will other data accessed rarely could be stored on the HD. This way, you'd get the best of both world. I wonder if this can be done in Linux using a kind of soft-RAID ?

Let's not forget GPT.

inb4 tons of Windows XP users being unable to use the full capacity of their 3 TB hard drives...

Good news, you can never have enough hard disk space. Having that said though 640 Terabytes ought to be enough for anyone...

12GB full? Oh my, where ever will that 12gb fit in 3TB?

I'm looking forward to my next upgrade around the 5TB range. Slap 4 in a RAID0 and I am good to go for a decade .

I have a RAID5 server with 3x1tb and 3x1.5tb and 2 RAID5 cards - well worth the investement. Check out the Highpoint RocketRaid 2300 PCIe 1x cards, not hardware raid 5 but performance is better then Nvidia's RAID10 arrays.

Impressive! Talk about not even 20 years ago when I had my 20MB HDD and it was huge! The 1GB HDD's came out about 10 years and a bit ago, costing quite a bit. If I can remember correctly, at one point we were paying 100$ per 100MB, then 100$ per 1GB, now it's 100$ per TB, it's so impressive!

I'd say since one file is bigger than your whole raid array. Are you using the dive thats in the picture? GB TB

I have a 250 GB drive (0.25 TB) and I have 140 GB of free space! I can't imagine what I would do with a 1 TB drive, let alone 3 TB so for me the best thing would be to get a good SSD.

Woo
soon I shall buy a media HDD
all that HD movies and flac music take a toll on HDD space

in Australia I havn't seen SSDs drop a cent in price since they came out. I could get the top of the line WD 2TB black for far cheaper than a 128gb ssd.

currently, Mechanical harddrives are only a dying breed in the same way that cockroaches will out live us all...

more to the point, they are for completely different applications.

this would be great to put all my dvds and all my music cd's into a loseless quality storage... but i think id have to buy 2 for raid 1 operation since i wouldnt want to lose that much work.

Every time I think that SSDs will finally put the HDDs out to pasture, another announcement like this comes along to convince me otherwise. 3TBs on one drive, amazing!

Every time I think that SSDs will finally put the HDDs out to pasture, another announcement like this comes along to convince me otherwise. 3TBs on one drive, amazing!

I bet they'll be expensive but hopefully the 2TB will go down in price a little.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

I wish this would lead to a $10 drive with 100GB on it for those of us trying to get build cost down for basic machines. I keep seeing 1TB drives on sale for $69 but I think, I need 50GB. So sure if you are ripping Blu-Ray, which on a 100" screen look good transcoded down to about 5GB, IMO, you need the big drives, but I'm guessing the vast majority of hard drive space is getting wasted on your average home computer.

Keep on wishin buddy, hate to break it to you but you aren't going to see a hard drive go that low unless resold used from someone online. They would be losing money selling hard drives that low even with demand and newer technology years or decades later. I can't imagine hard drives costing less than $30 to manufacture.