Computerworld – Seagate Tuesday released its highly anticipated 3TB desktop hard disk drive, the 3.5-in Barracuda XT, thus eliminating the need to purchase extra hardware or software to overcome the previous 2.1TB drive barrier.

Last spring, Seagate had said it would ship its first 3TB HDD, the Constellation ES, by the end of 2010. That drive, for data center servers. has yet to ship.

Western Digital came out with its first 3TB internal desktop drive in January, the Western Digital Caviar Green. Western Digital had its own workaround for the 2.1TB limitation: a HighPoint Rocket 620 internal half-height SATA card, which it ships with the 3TB drive. The card has two SATA 3.0 ports and handles the emulation, if needed, to allow software to work with the larger 3TB hard drive.

Unreal… that’s 3 million megabytes! I can remember when I thought my 300MB HDD was huge!




  1. deowll says:

    I don’t get why this is news. I bought an external three T drive months ago.

    This is not a problem if you are using the right chips and the right OS. 64 not 32

  2. ChuckM says:

    Ahh…

    RLL and MFM – Nuff said.

  3. What? says:

    Steve Jobs has one, in a really fat iPod. He has every song ever recorded stored on it, all pirated.

    The real question is: does it blend?

  4. jobs says:

    #34 I think this is news because it the first 3Tb drive to work on older computers and older OS’s.

  5. Grandpa says:

    First HD was a 120 MB one in a dandy Tandy 486 25 computer. My wife said “careful you’re going to break it”. She was right and it was a wonderful learning experience fixing it. 3 TB ought to be just right for storing BD movies eh. All of a sudden lossless is more practical than mp3, BD is more practical than DVD, and the march goes on.

  6. Animby says:

    # 9 Uncle Dave said, “Apple came out with a 5 MByte hard disk. It was heaven!”

    Yeah. I got a similar story except my 5MB were running CP/M and DOS. I think it was 1981 and I spent something like $3500 for that thing. My wife went ballistic. But, the reason I’m posting is because yours made me think: Considering how my income has changed since then (and completely ignoring inflation), that was as insane as me going out today and buying a 50 MB SD card for $35K !!! No wonder she divorced me.

    Next: We discuss how, when my neighbors complained about the late night noise from my Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer, I went out and bought my first laser printer. That would be ex-wife #2…

  7. Sister Mary Hand Grenade of Quiet Reflection says:

    #29 – Dallas, I couldn’t agree more. SSDs make my nipples hard.

  8. Luc says:

    You’re all wrong. The true point of this article is to bring up all these stories about how the West was won and reveal how old an average DU reader is: VERY old.

    [Exactly! – ed.]

  9. Benjamin says:

    What are you putting on these hardrives. I have yet to fill up a 100GB harddrive, let alone a terrabyte. I couldn’t imagine filling up three.

    This is with duel boot Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7, plus Office, several virtual machines, and all my photos and music.

    Really, what is on these hardrives? ISOs of every movie on bittorrent? Please tell me. I am not making good use of the space that I have, so I need some ideas.

  10. #42 just admitted to having no movies or music. 🙂

  11. Dallas says:

    #40 agree sister. Nipples do respond to SSD’s .

    I hope to have one as a master boot disk with windows 8. Between SSD’s and cloud storage, moving parts in a pc will be uncommon in 5-8 years

  12. Olo Baggins of Bywater says:

    Dallas…fans. You probably won’t get away from fans because non-moving solutions are ++ expensive.

  13. JimD says:

    With all the Telcos clamping down on bandwidth and going to tiered pricing, this may be the last drive you will need to buy !!! It might even take a lifetime to fill !!! Unlike say, Korea, where they intend to give every home a 1 G/s connection for $27 a month, our Telcos motto is “All your Capital are belong to us” !!!

  14. Uncle Patso says:

    Still have my first hard drive — a Quantum 52MB SCSI-II drive, in a SupraDrive 500XP SCSI adapter/memory board that plugged in the side of my Amiga 500. Still worked last time I fired it up, 2008 or so. Cost less than $300 in the late ’80s, if memory serves. The first disk drive I ever owned, a C= 1541 cost about the same ten years earlier.

  15. bb says:

    First HD: a 18 MB monster, $4,000 and 80 lbs for a Northstar Horizon. Ran CP/M and later, TurboDOS (on the same HD). $1,000 bought a single 64kB (k!) s100 card.

    It booted before one could blink, and scroll (at 9600 baud) better than a screen a second.

    And I still think in WordStar. ^Q^S

    -bb

  16. Dallas says:

    #45 Good point. I forgot about those fans… They will be here for a while. Water cooled systems are still immature.

    #42 Benjie. I fill them up with RAW image files. 24Mipixel sensor 5DMII DSLR’s for instance produce monster RAW files.

    Also fill them up with music videos at 80-100MB each. I consume just under a terabyte a year and then you gotta back it up or stripe the drive.

    Alotta bits but big deal. A 2 Terabyte drive is now $79 on sale.

  17. KD Martin says:

    How about a 10MB CDC Hawk drive? 5 fixed, 5 removable, 18″ platters. $1,200 in the late 70s / early 80s. Two of ’em were about the size of a large washing machine. Hooked one up to a Dec PDP/11. Nice home machine for the times. You can find a used drive today for about $600.

    Photobucket

    Collins built HDDs in the 250MB range with 4 platters that were 6 feet (yes, feet) diameter and hydraulic head movers. It was always fun walking past the “walkers”, especially with the oil slick floors.

    Anyone remember the IBM Data Cell?

  18. deowll says:

    #42 A fairly large music collection, a lot of ebooks and text files I created, a very large number of photos most of which I took. I have video cameras and most do high def. Two hours of high def video can take up a lot of space. It doesn’t take all than many graduations, Christmas program, ball, games and talent shows to start to make a dent.

  19. Benjamin says:

    #43 and #44

    I have a stack of CDs as tall as I am encoded in MP3 at the 256. I have some pictures and stuff. I also have a simulation of the universe. It is true that I don’t have movies or RAW photos. Most of what I produce is Word documents and the largest ones are only about 800 KB. Those are novel length works. I probably could rip all my DVDs and fill up the drive that way.

  20. Benjamin says:

    Is it a consensus that I need a video camera or a DSLR to generate enough bits to fill a 3 TB drive then?

    I want to buy a new hard drive for my Linux server. I thought $79 was how much a hard drives costs. The last three drives I bought were in that price range.

  21. Rich says:

    Ummmm- you can cram your 3 TB drive. When that sucker suffers a head crash or other catastrophic hardware failure, that’s 3 TB worth of data gone, unless you mirror that to a second godawful expensive 3 TB drive. It’s called putting all your eggs into one basket. I’d rather split it up among several 1 TB WD Green drives, and that’s what I do.

  22. Benjamin says:

    I’d just get 5 and make a RAID5 with them. Nope, I don’t need that much data.


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