What are the 3TB HDD drawbacks

[sinekonata]

Compared to 1 and 2 TB, what are the drawbacks of 3 or 4 TB?

Is there a trend/rule that says that the lower the volume the better it responds due to lower inertia? Or is that solely tied to the RPMs number? Does inertia not play a role at all because (let's say) HDDs never stop spinning at constant RPMs?

Aside from speed I heard the argument that 2x1TB is better than 1x2TB because of the risk of losing it all instead of half (not sure I got it right cause it makes no sense to me). Or maybe they are they just more prone to death or failure in general maybe because they've been tested for less long or heat more?

I also heard there was a problem under the Windows OS not being able to recognize the full 3TB but 2 partitions/volumes of 2.2 and 0.8. It seems Linux prepared for that but I still want to know your experience, I might need Win7 in the future.

So besides these aspects I imagine/guess/know to be problems, is there anything more to know about it? Or am I just paranoid and 3-4TB are absolutely the same or better?

Just note that the comparisons are not about price or size obviously, just everything else...

Thanks

 

[completelyrandomname]

Pros
More storage

Cons
You won't use it all

There's nothing wrong with getting a larger drive. You are over thinking this.

 

[USAFRet]

One downside is if you have a really old system that can't talk to 3TB.
Another is if you fail to backup your stuff. Losing 3TB at a time is not fun. But they are not more prone to dying than smaller hard drives.

Speed issues? No.

 

[popatim]

Cannot be used as a boot drive unless your motherbd is uefi.
Some backup software cannot backup partitions greater than 2tb.

 

[sinekonata]

Cannot be used as a boot drive unless your motherbd is uefi.
Some backup software cannot backup partitions greater than 2tb.

I hear that is true for windows, but not linux. At least I hope so cause yeah it would be my boot drive until I can afford a new system...

 

[Hawkeye22]

Boot drives larger than 2TB must use a UEFI motherboard and it must be the 64 bit version of windows.

Q. Can Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 read, write, and boot from GPT disks?

A. Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx

 

[popatim]

Most linux distros support booting from 3tb drives even without an efi/uefi motherbd but the bios must have 3tb drive support.