The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing - Jeane Baptiste Colbert
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Seagate external 3TB hard drive tips up
HARD DRIVE MANUFACTURER Seagate has released what it's claiming as the world's first three terabyte (3TB) external hard drive.
Seagate released the Freeagent Goflex Desk unit to "meet the explosive worldwide demand" for storage, or more accurately, the needs of downloaders to hoard their dodgy data. While the capacity is undoubtedly there, the connectivity isn't.
Given the immense capacity and its flagship status, one would expect that Seagate would kit out the Freeagent Goflex with adequate connections. Instead the drive will ship with USB2 connectivity with the option of upgrading to USB3 or Firewire 800. That means those who actually want to use the drive for anything other than a file dump will have to shell out more than the initial $250 asking price.
What the firm isn't so open about is whether the Freeagent Goflex is actually a single 3TB disk drive, which would make it 50 per cent larger than previous capacity leaders, or just two 1.5TB RAIDed or otherwise stuck together. Despite our best efforts, no one from Seagate was available for comment.
The 3TB behemoth actually tipped up sooner than expected, with Seagate having told The INQUIRER only last month that it was "planning a 3TB drive towards the end of the year." Apparently the firm was less interested in bringing out a 3TB unit due to a combination of operating system and BIOS limitations, though it seems that those have been cast to the side for now.
With so much data in such a small space, the headache for users will be how to replicate the data elsewhere, and recover it should anything go wrong. µ
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Biggest problem is - it gets non responsive when you haven't saved or opened a file for a while and it takes ages before it "wakes up". Otherwise it works fine.
I bought one. Every time the drive sits long enough the hard drive becomes non-responsive, you can no longer access the drive. If you try, it gives an i/o error. You must then unplug the drive from your system, plug it in again and let your computer find the drive again. It works fine until you let it sit again for an hour or so.
When I asked Seagate for help, they told me to go buy a new cable and see it that works.
Seagate Unit Is ONE HDD, With 6 500 GB Platters. So Past first Question of Dennis. Next Half Step Back. In 32 bit limit of Master Boot record, 2.2 TB. ?2 Gb for Volatile Memory. In dual channel, Double. That was Question of latter 5 years, Now well behind. Except Here. IN Storage. SAme Idea, Differning Speeds & Abilities.
To Overcome Limit, Seagate Cut Number of Address Points, Each Point has more space, so more TB of Address. From 512 to 2 KB for Each Point. that means if most files are 400 bytes, then rest of that address space Is Wasted or Empty.
So UP ON Hardware ,Down On Controller.
In Year 4TB Is Comin' Martha, 3TB IS Early. Soon Whole World Will Be Ultee'
vondrashek
"What the firm isn't so open about is whether the Freeagent Goflex is actually a single 3TB disk drive, which would make it 50 per cent larger than previous capacity leaders, or just two 1.5TB RAIDed or otherwise stuck together. Despite our best efforts, no one from Seagate was available for comment."
According to the specs on the Seagate site, the 3TB model has the exact same external dimensions as its 1 and 2TB siblings, so I'd hazard a guess that it has exactly the same number of drives stuffed inside as those versions... And given that the external dimensions are a pretty good match to the dimensions of a single bare 3.5" drive (allowing a few mm all round for the thickness of the casing and interface PCB), I'd further hazard a guess that the number of drives inside is 1.
"Seagate external 3TB hard drive tips up"
Not *another* product covered by The Inq that has a stability problem!? What's with all these bits of kit that keep tipping up (falling over)?
Oh, and yeah, a USB interface on a 3TB disk may seem so wrong, but it caters for the mass market who don't have eSATA or firewire and just want a heap of storage for their media collection; you'd be mad to use these devices to host a database or do something like video editing or RAID, but having just USB on the base model will make disk-disk backups stupidly slow.
How much extra would it have cost to include a combo USB/eSATA/Firewire interface as standard like some other units? Surely there's a chip for that?
"USB2 and 3Tb? Very strange combination. USB2 automatically reduce the I/O speed to 30Mb/s from 80-100Mb/s. Who needs 3Tb disk which is 3 times slower than eSata or USB3? This gadget is close to useless."
I agree that USB2 is near-useless for external disks, due to its slow speed. But Firewire 800 achieves 70 MB/s in real world transfers and it's been with us for years. No need to wait for USB3. Plus Firewire uses DMA mode transfers, just like PATA and SATA, so it doesn't place a load on the host CPU like USB does.
USB2 and 3Tb? Very strange combination. USB2 automatically reduce the I/O speed to 30Mb/s from 80-100Mb/s. Who needs 3Tb disk which is 3 times slower than eSata or USB3? This gadget is close to useless.
@Argon88
If these things are as reliable as other recent Seagates, backing one up onto another one may not actually net you very much. Until I wised up and switched brands, I had whole *batches* of Seagates fail (as in, total data loss). That was over a year ago; they may well be better now, but I personally just dont want to take the chance.
@BB
Have you ever tried copying large amounts of data - like a couple of terabytes - over USB2? It can be done, if you can wait a couple of days.
Since USB3 is now well and truly available, and since this is a "flagship" drive, it seems reasonable to expect it to come with USB3 as standard. It doesnt. So its fine if you are willing and able to start your backup job and leave it running overnight, but pretty crap otherwise.
"That means those who actually want to use the drive for anything other than a file dump will have to shell out more than the initial $250 asking price."
Who would use an external hard drive for anything other than that purpose?
+1
duh... c'mon inq
"With so much data in such a small space, the headache for users will be how to replicate the data elsewhere, and recover it should anything go wrong."
Why is it a headache? Simply buy two, and back one up to the other. That's what I do. Have a 2 TB drive on eSATA with all my data. Have another 2 TB drive on Firewire 800 that I keep locked in a closet. Once a month, get out the Firewire drive from the closet and run a backup. Easy Peasy.