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HDD prices, and any info on 3TB drives?

G

glugglug

Diamond Member
I've been watching HDD prices for awhile now, as I intend to buy a Ceton quad-CableCard tuner when it comes out, and get rid of my Time Warner DVRs, instead using only the PC as a super-DVR, and would like to have a 2TB drive in there dedicated to this purpose.

What I have noticed is that prices have not dropped since last year when I built my main PC. In fact, they have gone up a bit on most components including drives, which seems really bizarre to me for computer parts.

There are some sites rumoring that 3TB drives should appear by April, but the details are all very sketchy, and most are just re-reporting what they read in the Register. Is there anything more concrete on this? Is a price drop for 2TB around the corner with 3TB becoming available?
 
I talked to a major manufacturer who uses a lot of disks and was told that WDC 3 TB disks were still expected in the next few months.
 
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IF the drives existed (they don't) and IF I could afford them (I can't), I wouldn't put it in a primary storage server anyway. I'd use something that new and that big for making backups of my storage servers.

Lately, it seems that disk makers don't exactly have a pristine history with their new products.
 
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My understanding is that the major platter manufacturer (TDK) is currently beta testing 640 GB platters. The hope is that the first batches should be ready for shipping to OEMs early in H2, with volume production beginning in Q4.

This should permit 4 platter drives (the current max to reach 2.5 TB). If any manufacturers wantto go back to 5 platters, then there is the option of 3TB. But the 4 platter drives are expensive enough already.
 
Not to mention why anyone would trust a 5 platter drive....i would NEVER trust a 5 platter drive I refuse to use anything over 2 platters. I am DR tech, and I deal with these things every day and it is astonishing how we trust these devices with our data.


I can't say much, but 2.5TB is on the way soon, but 3TB wont see the light of day till the end of the year.
 
Russwinters said:
Not to mention why anyone would trust a 5 platter drive....i would NEVER trust a 5 platter drive I refuse to use anything over 2 platters
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I have a couple of the original Hitachi 1 TB five-platter drives. They've been OK so far, even though I dropped my whole server off a chair onto the carpet last summer (whoops). It had three Hitachi 1 TB disks running at the time.

Actually, one of those disks (a three-platter Hitachi) DID have a problem when I fired it up again after several months. A VHD got scrambled. At this point, if any of those poor Hitachis say bye-bye, I can't really blame them. Heck, they were shipped to me by Tiger direct in what was, essentially, an empty cardboard box. They've had a tough life so far.
 
Russwinters said:
Not to mention why anyone would trust a 5 platter drive....i would NEVER trust a 5 platter drive I refuse to use anything over 2 platters. I am DR tech, and I deal with these things every day and it is astonishing how we trust these devices with our data.
Click to expand...

What??? I used to have a pile of 11-platter drives, and they never, ever suffered mechanical failure (the electronics on those Seagate Barracuda 4's were a different story!). Why would you worry about a mere 5 or 6 platters? Has something happened in the past 10 years that makes >2 platters drives less reliable than they were in the 1990s when 10 platter 3.5" drives were commonplace?

Oh, and if you want a real horror story -- in 1996-1997, Seagate launched the Barracuda 2 2HP, which was a 10 or 11 platter drive, with 2 independant actuators, and a whopping total of 20/22 heads (10 per actuator). Basically it was twice as fast as anything on the market and it took a decade before it was superceded in the marketplace in terms of random I/O performance (by a Seagate X15). ST12450W was the model name I believe.

(and it had no reliability problems to speak of....but the drive and the concept was a failure in the marketplace because it only stored 1.8gb, and cost around $2000 per unit, whereas, other manufacturers could deliver 4gb SCSI drives @ $1200/unit).
 
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Manufacturers Use Fluid dynamic bearings on spindles now, which are better for logevity, but can't take shock as well. The more weight on the platter the higher chance of it going out in a shock, and you would be surprised how often people drop/shock their drives.


Seagates current bearings are BAD. I see about 4-5 of these drives a month (500GB-1.5TB)

Alot of these are the same ones that can also suffer from firmware failure, and even the ones that have been fixed.

Just when you thought you were safe!


Also, because BPI density has increased so much from those days more platter are harder to align properly; also more platters = more heads = more parts = higher probability of failure.

And when you do need the thing fixed, it's gonna cost you more because more platters and more heads = higher difficulty.
 
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