back to article Seagate preps three terabyte whopper

Seagate has confirmed it will offer a 3TB drive. As reported by Thinq, the company should announce its 3TB 3.5-inch disk drive by the end of the year, subject to operating system, motherboard BIOS and RAID vendor support. Disk drives are addressed in 512-byte sectors, logical block addresses (LBAs) as set down by DOS back in …

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  1. Mage Silver badge
    Boffin

    FUD

    I think it's nonsense to claim XP can't deal with it.

    What they mean is can't do it out of the box, or may not run efficiently . But since 1993 you could add drivers for storage devices. XP out of the box won't install on SATA. (I know it's a different issue).

    NT (and thus XP etc) since the beginning (1993/1994) has supported Exabyte sized file systems. It's purely a matter of suitable drivers.

  2. Danny 4
    Linux

    Linux naturally

    Of course, why not just use Linux.

    Oh, how I laugh as the Windows lusers jump through more hoops like the trained puppies they are. Just say no guys, and get yourself a proper operating system.

    1. oddie
      Troll

      I suppose this is as good a time as any..

      to go look for that 1.0 kernel that I have laying about somewhere.. Good thing I don't need to get the latest version of the linux kernel (like you have to do with the ole windoze) to work with these massive disks, eh?

      There are lots of good reasons/places to use linux rather than windows.. the fact that the latest version of it supports more hardware than a 10(ish) year old version of windows isn't really one of them...

      1. Annihilator
        Coffee/keyboard

        @oddie

        cough...splutter..chortle. Thanks for that :-)

  3. Petey
    Coat

    Erm, really?

    "users effectively won't be able to use drives with more than 1.1TB capacity,"

    Well I best go and destroy the other ~400GB of movies I have stored on there then.

    DAMN.

  4. Nigel 11
    Coat

    Able was I ...

    Windows XP can now share an epitaph with Napoleon Bonaparte

    Able was I ere I saw ELBA

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Danny 4

    "Just say no guys, and get yourself a proper operating system.". = Linux

    Dan, boy, which banana tree did you just fall out of?

  6. John 118

    @ The flopping bird

    "and get yourself a proper operating system." ...

    But does it play Crysis?

  7. John Gray
    Thumb Down

    @Petey

    Be fair - there were two instances of 2.1 GB and only one of 1.1 GB, which is fairly obviously a typo...

  8. shade82000
    Stop

    Here we go again...

    Reading the first post, wondering how long it will be before this turns into a Linux v. Windows slag-o-rama and bang, there it was. 2nd post.

    We all know that using Windows is like trying to turn left in an elevator and using Linux is like trying to drive a car without a dashboard...

    ...but does it have do be said over and over. Write something original for a change.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      drag it down a notch further

      linux nazi

  9. Mad Hacker
    Gates Halo

    Windows XP...

    I thought everyone was happily using Vista which has no problems with these drive sizes. Or any problems of any other kind.

  10. Noogie Brown
    Joke

    Imagine...

    ... a beowulf cluster of those!

  11. me 10
    Jobs Horns

    What! No OS/2 Warp support!

    Screw u fanbois! Where's my warp support for this? I suppose DOS 6 can't use it either? PCDOS? Guess I'll have to write my own OS then. Right. Time to get to it.

  12. The Unexpected Bill
    Badgers

    Disk Space Limits

    For those wondering, the limits are not a product of the file system in use, and it's debatable whether or not the limit is really the operating system.

    Master Boot Record (MBR) partition tables are the only type supported by any 32-bit edition of Windows XP. While NTFS could no doubt go larger, MBR simply runs out of steam at 2TB and that's it. I don't know if any of the NTFS volume spanning tricks and dynamic disks could get you around this or not. What I say here is a result of what I found when I had three 1TB drives running from a HighPoint RAID controller in RAID0 mode. As I only tried this out of curiosity, I didn't experiment further.

    To go further, you need something else. The solution that most everyone seems to have agreed upon is the GPT (GUID partition table). Windows XP 32-bit and 2000 both seem to have some awareness of GPT disks, but they don't know how to mount or access one. However, Windows XP in its x86-64 edition does support GPT since it's based on the Windows Server 2003 code base (which also supports GPT).

    Windows easily supports the concept of installable file systems, but I don't know about an "installable partition system".

    Don't get me started on the advanced format drives...manufacturer support for these is nonexistent if you don't run Windows or Mac OS. It seems that Linux has been OK with these for a while and FreeBSD as an unknown. For now, I'm just running the lone example of an "advanced format" drive that I have in "performance be damned" mode, because I spent hours screwing around in hopes of using the drive and its 4K sector size optimally, after which I finally decided I could be doing better things with my life. As the machine in question is a K6-2 500 box running FreeNAS with a hundred megabit link, I doubt it will ever come anywhere near to the performance level of the advanced format drive.

    (badger icon because I think it's funny!)

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Haven't even come close to filling the 250Gig one I have.

    What's the point?

    At say half a terabyte, from thence on it's price/speed, size is irrelevant.

  14. Robert Hill
    Terminator

    Haven't had this much disk fun...

    since we used to play with hot-rodding run-length limited drives (RLL) under DOS...

    Seriously, this just has the potential to be an unmitigated disaster...people buying drives that won't work, configuration issues, an inability to restore after a lost drive (because _that drive_ had all the software updates that enabled larger drives), and even data loss due to configuration issues.

    I used to think my least favourite job was Nigerian toilet cleaner - when these drives flood the market, I think I'll change that to "Dell front-line support agent"...

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Re: Linux naturally

    ... sigh. You may think it'll just work "out of the box" for Linux, but it doesn't generally.

    When doing testing of hard drives with real 4k sectors (rather than the ones pretending through reporting 512bytes), pretty much every distro without parted 2.x fails. (ie RHEL, SLES, OpenSuSE, etc). That's most stuff. (Especially avoid anything related to SuSE/SLES. Bad news all round.)

    Very recent releases (ie very latest Fedora, Ubuntu, etc) and likely the source based distributions (ie Gentoo, etc) are probably ok.

  16. Graham Lockley
    Happy

    @AC 18:37

    "Haven't even come close to filling the 250Gig one I have"

    I've got 3.5 Tb disk space two thirds full.... whats your secret ?

    1. John H Woods Silver badge
      Happy

      Maybe he...

      ... doesn't have any pr0n?

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