New 3TB hard drive hits the market - Printable Version +- howtothings.co.uk (https://www.howtothings.co.uk) +-- Forum: Open Discussion (https://www.howtothings.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?fid=5) +--- Forum: The Lounge (https://www.howtothings.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?fid=18) +--- Thread: New 3TB hard drive hits the market (/showthread.php?tid=178)

New 3TB hard drive hits the market - Mark - 03-07-2010 Seagate launches their new 3TB external drive Seagate have set a new capacity record for hard drives, with their "FreeAgent GoFlex" that features a single 3TB hard drive. This is the worlds first single 3TB drive, although this version is stuck in an external case. The name of choice, the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external hard disk, featuring USB 2.0, USB 3.0 or FireWire 800 depending on the transfer speed you need and the connections you have available. I quote Segate's Dave Mosley from his official announcement: "Consumer capacity demands are quickly out-pacing the needs of business as people continue to collect high-definition videos, photos and music." "Seagate has a tradition of designing products that break into new storage frontiers to meet customer requirements and the 3TB GoFlex Desk external drive is no exception – delivering the highest-capacity storage solution available today." Although it's possible to create your own 3TB (or larger) external disk using an enclosure or a barebone NAS machine. Convenience plays a big factor in this, people now have huge amounts of photos, videos, music and documents that they need to back up - having a ready-made USB disk is important if you need to perform a backup quickly and efficiently, it's also a lot more portable. With the internal laptop and standard computer hard drives becoming bigger you could easily fill up a 3TB drive by just backing up one Computer and a laptop. Seagate claims the drive has been specially engineered to exceed the 2.1TB limitation in Windows. The dimensions of the device being only 158x124x44mm the new drive is also considerably smaller than a two-bay NAS machine or a twin-disk product. The downside is the price, it's a hefty $250 RRP, which, when put up against either 3x1TB or 2x2TB drives plus enclosure, is asking a lot. Also, with the extra drives such as going with a 2x2TB set up allows for data corruption or a drive failure meaning that you'll still have the files safe if using RAID. There is no word yet on an internal 3TB SATA drive(s). Do you need one? What do you think about it? Let us know your thoughts. RE: New 3TB hard drive hits the market - bigsharn - 03-07-2010 Correction there Mark, they're working on a BIOS workaround for the (1.99Tb, not 2.1Tb) unusability... They're working with MSI iirc to come up with it As it says the 3Tb is doable on a firewire cable (plus USB to power it of course) but they just haven't come up with a viable solution for SATA yet RE: New 3TB hard drive hits the market - Mark - 03-07-2010 Nice addition info, thanks.