Seagate Rolls Out 4 TB Hard Drives

[cinergy]

I still have space left in my old 1TB drive and I haven't even tried to clean it up. Hard drives are getting too spacious so we can stop caring about these "milestones".

 

[acyuta]

Increasingly, Tom's Hardware is posting out old news. This news has been out for perhaps 1 or even 2 months as web search will testify. Increasingly, as others have said, Tom's has become a second or even worse third-/fourth- hand source of info, and not the first source. One source which is dated March 2013 is posted below

http://www.itproportal.com/2013/03/12/seagate-officially-unveils-4tb-desktop-hdd/

As to roll out, it has been available for some weeks now so I could not gather what is meant by roll out. Maybe Seagate wanted to generate some buzz. So they perhaps issued a press release, which has been picked by many (search google). Tom's should however have checked before posting.

It seems this cut and paste and laziness is reflected in other sections. The best CPU, GPUs etc are updated every month but it seems only the month of publication has been changed.

 

[wanderer11]

[citation][nom]Shockeray[/nom]Yeah, I don't know anyone that has ever filled a 1Tb HD, maybe 3D designers storing all kinds of full detailed models?[/citation]
My Steam library takes up about 600GB. Give me a couple more years and it will be 1 TB.

 

[DrTeknical]

So, a few of you don't need lots of hard drive space and think that's a virtue. Whatever. For the rest of us - the geeks and techs who KNOW they'll be needing more space soon, these really big drives are a must-have. HOWEVER, if you haven't used a drive over 2GB in size yet, you may not know how to properly format it so that you can use ALL of the space on it. NTFS is not the way to go! Here's an article that takes you through the steps to properly format these new big drives.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/i-have-a-3-tb-drive-windows-7-ultimate-wont-format/b1cc3811-f25f-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5

As for whether or not you can boot from one of these drives, it will depend on your MB. Here's a Tom's article about that:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/285327-32-problem-boot-disk

I'm using a Seagate 3Gb drive as storage with a 128GB SSD as the boot device. Wicked fast and I don't have to worry about bootable acronyms...

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]InvalidError[/nom]Three years? Five year warranties were almost standard until the mid-2000s, then they dropped to three years for mid-range drives and one year for consumer/budget models.Most of my failed HDDs crashed during the 2nd year so I am really skeptical of HDD manufacturers' claims that the reason they reduced the standard warranty to one year is because most drives fail within the first year... it personally makes me quite wary of 1-year drives.On the other hand, all my 3+ years old HDDs are still working fine.[/citation]

i use a pc 24/7
i have a 250gb drive still in use (thought not used for anything important) that is 8 close to 9 years old.

ever sense the warranty bs, i have a new plan, but a new hdd every year as mass storage, as i now use an ssd to boot, it is alot easier on me to fully replace a data drive than a boot drive.

 

[JohnUSA]

Open letter from HD cheaters (I mean manufacturers):
I will never buy anything you make that comes with less than 5 years warranty.
We all know that once you dropped the length of your warranty that you all started producing low quality garbage that causes all your buyers a lot of grief and suffering when your poor quality drives fail and we lose all our valuable data.
Here is a free advice to all you cheapskates: Make quality drives and improve your warranty and we will then buy them. We don't mind paying a little more. Peace of mind is priceless.

 

[JohnUSA]

CORRECTION:
Open letter to HD cheaters (I mean manufacturers):

 

[back_by_demand]

[citation][nom]Shockeray[/nom]Yeah, I don't know anyone that has ever filled a 1Tb HD, maybe 3D designers storing all kinds of full detailed models?[/citation]
Sheerly from TV shows and movies I have managed to rock nearly 12Tb
...
No they are not pirated, but personal backups of DVDs or Blurays for the purpose of playing through XBMC, it is the most convenient home entertainment method but requires large amounts of HDD space
...
I always buy HDDs in pairs for backup purposes, 2x1Tb, 2x2Tb, 2x3Tb - next will be 2x4Tb and that should keep me in storage for the foreseeable

 

[thecolorblue]

[citation][nom]cinergy[/nom]I still have space left in my old 1TB drive and I haven't even tried to clean it up. Hard drives are getting too spacious so we can stop caring about these "milestones".[/citation]
i have multiple terabytes of lossless music on HDD... many people RIP BluRay discs onto HDD in order to negate the atrocious sh!tpile of DRM messages and non-skippable commercials... so there's another 4-10 terabytes of data. sounds like you don'tknow how to use your computer

 

[mapesdhs]

[citation][nom]jhansonxi[/nom]I once had IBM Ultrastar 36GB SCSI drives with 10 platters. Expensive, heavy and hot. Makes me really appreciate today's data density.[/citation]

I'm still using Fujitsu 36GB 15K SCA drives; dirt cheap, crazy fast and very quiet. 😀 I bought 380
of them; sold many to hospitals, textile companies, defense places and other corps worldwide.
Perfect upgrade where nasty SCSIs like those IBMs have failed. Not all SCSI is/was the same...

My main systems are all SSD-based for system drives though, including the SGI which normally
uses SCSI (60GB + 120GB OCZ Vertex2E via ARS-2160 SCSI/SATA bridge box and an LSI SAS3442X-R).

I've gathered performance data when I've been able. Note the access times compared to SATA, though
newer SATA have really good sequential rates.

But yeah, old drives could indeed be hot & noisy. Early 15Ks could fry an egg, and I have a
50GB Seagate 1.6" SCSI which is louder than my vacuum cleaner. 😀

Ian.

 

[Bayushi]

"Yeah, I don't know anyone that has ever filled a 1Tb HD, maybe 3D designers storing all kinds of full detailed models?"

What?

I have two nearly full 1TB drives inside my PC, and a 1TB external that's entirely full (backup drive).

As media gets better and better, file sizes get larger and larger. Tron: Legacy in 1080p (MP4 file) is 4.02GB by itself, as is Iron Man. Act of Valor (1080p/MP4) is just over 3.6GB. Captain America: The First Avenger (1080p/MP4) is 3.88GB. Iron Man 2 is 4.04GB(1080p/MP4).

So, the average 2 hour High Definition film in MP4 format is right around 4GB. Get enough of them and your hard disk will fill up soon. This isn't even counting the music I have stored on my internal drives.

Then we have video games. My Steam directory alone is 283GB. Three instances of World of Warcraft each occupying 26.8GB.

Now imagine the file sizes on UHD films? I imagine that the average 2-hour UHD film will be about 16GB in size.