Drives Bigger than 2TB. WHEN?

photoshop

photoshop

photoshop

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When can we expect to see drives larger than 2Tb?

Im going to be in need of 1 soon enough and would prefer a larger drive as oppose to 2 smaller ones (less heat and noise).



The current 2Tb drrives are 5400rpm as oppose to 7200rpm. Would this impact on speeds?

I stream blurays via RJ45 to my HTPC. Would a 5400rpm drive introduce stuttering and buffering issues?
 
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I imagine we will see something bigger this year at some point but not sure when.

Not sure about your bluray question I'm afraid, I would guess it would be ok, but that's just a guess.
 
photoshop said:
When can we expect to see drives larger than 2Tb?
Click to expand...

No idea. When 2TB drives come down in price I assume.

photoshop said:
The current 2Tb drrives are 5400rpm as oppose to 7200rpm. Would this impact on speeds?

I stream blurays via RJ45 to my HTPC. Would a 5400rpm drive introduce stuttering and buffering issues?
Click to expand...

5400RPM will have an impact on speeds, compared to if it was 7200RPM, but due to the density of the platters (not sure how many platters these have, but it's probably 4, so 500GB per platter), the speeds should be equal, if not higher, than a drive of lower capacity. For example, compared to a 750GB 2 platter 5400RPM drive, the 2TB drive will be faster. It may even match a 7200RPM 750GB drive.

No doubt it will be absolutely fine for streaming. If you can watch 1080p movies from a blu-ray disc reading at 2x (9MB/s), then you can DEFINITELY stream 1080p from a HDD reading at >70MB/s.
 
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Atm as well the only company with 2TB drives are WD. They have two, but until another manufacturer comes out, then I don't think we'll see either a price drop or anything else.

I'm in a similar situation to the OP as well.
 
Thanks to the fact that disks > 2TB have to use GPT to see all the space, and you can't boot from a GPT disk with any of the current windows versions, I'd say it'll be at least 5 years before there is enough of a market that manufacturers release them (at consumer prices - they may well release drives targeted for enterprise use).

I predict that mechanical drive manufacturers will refocus on 2.5" drives, and this is where platter density advancements will show up, we'll see a 2TB 2.5" HDD before we see a 3TB 3.5".
 
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Going to agree with the above. Because of OS limitations, drives >2TB will take at least a year or two, and even after that, will be "enthusiastically" priced.

Sales volumes of >2TB drives will be quite low until Windows 7 is universally adopted, but high end users will buy them, and pair them with a fast SSD as an OS drive.

As far as 2Tb drives are concerned, performance of the WD RE4-GP, (the enterprise class 2Tb disk) is actually stunningly good for a 5400 rpm drive, and is actually close to Velociraptor levels. See review below:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=703

Prices will come down and performance will go up at the 2Tb level, once the competition (mostly Samsung) releases a similar product. But if you can source the RE4-GP, it's more than suitable for your needs, and will take a long time to be superseded in terms of capacity.
 
dntbloodshot said:
As far as 2Tb drives are concerned, performance of the WD RE4-GP, (the enterprise class 2Tb disk) is actually stunningly good for a 5400 rpm drive, and is actually close to Velociraptor levels. See review below:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=703
Click to expand...


Wow, that's really good. That means a 7200RPM version would outperform a Velociraptor, making it better value in both storage AND performance.
 
That has happened before with older WD Raptor drives, essentially, in time data density per platter increases so much that 7200rpm drives become faster than lower data density 10000 rpm drives.
 
dntbloodshot said:
Going to agree with the above. Because of OS limitations, drives >2TB will take at least a year or two, and even after that, will be "enthusiastically" priced.

Sales volumes of >2TB drives will be quite low until Windows 7 is universally adopted, but high end users will buy them, and pair them with a fast SSD as an OS drive.

As far as 2Tb drives are concerned, performance of the WD RE4-GP, (the enterprise class 2Tb disk) is actually stunningly good for a 5400 rpm drive, and is actually close to Velociraptor levels. See review below:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=703

Prices will come down and performance will go up at the 2Tb level, once the competition (mostly Samsung) releases a similar product. But if you can source the RE4-GP, it's more than suitable for your needs, and will take a long time to be superseded in terms of capacity.
Click to expand...

That article may be right. But I lose a lot of confidence in that the article it refers to (about 'Kryder's law') is fundamentally flawed. It states that Moore's law (doubling in speed every 18 months) is a snail's pace compared to Kryder's law (the rate at which hard drives have increased in capacity since 1956), quoting 2kb to 100gb per square inch, a 50 million-fold increase. So.. since 1956 = 53 years, 53/1.5 = c. 35 - the number of times a given speed doubles between 1956 to present day. So 2^35 = 34,359,738,368 - over a 34 billion-fold increase. So Kryder's law is nearly 1000 times slower than Moore's law, the article referred to is flawed, and whoever was reviewing the drive at pcper has missed this fundamental mistake - my confidence in them is lacking.
 
photoshop said:
I stream blurays via RJ45 to my HTPC. Would a 5400rpm drive introduce stuttering and buffering issues?
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Definitely not. Your Hard Disk will not be the bottle neck. The 5400rpm hard disk almost certainly has a faster transfer rate than a Blu Ray disk reader/recorder/player.

Your ethernet (RJ45) cable/hub/system will probably be your bottleneck.

As an example, I stream 720p material from my lounge to my bedroom PC via ethernet cable. 720p runs fine. 1080p sometimes, stutters. Bear in mind that the bottleneck here is my router.
 
the 2tb drives use 500gb platters and some manufacturers use 5 platters for their harddrives, so 2.5tb is realistic. To get any higher the size per platter would need to increase and theres 1 main manufacturer of platters and they havent announced any higher sizes yet.

the 2tb drives out are green or enterprise raid, no standard 2tb drives out yet so i doubt any larger drives than 2tb will be out in the next 6 months.

@ sunama, its unlikely that the bottleneck is your router, your router is 100mbps, your bluray movies are 15-40mbps which in real terms is around 1.6-4.4mb/sec speeds roughly, your router can cope with around 11mb/sec. A gigabit router wouldnt make any difference.
 
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sunama said:
Definitely not. Your Hard Disk will not be the bottle neck. The 5400rpm hard disk almost certainly has a faster transfer rate than a Blu Ray disk reader/recorder/player.

Your ethernet (RJ45) cable/hub/system will probably be your bottleneck.

As an example, I stream 720p material from my lounge to my bedroom PC via ethernet cable. 720p runs fine. 1080p sometimes, stutters. Bear in mind that the bottleneck here is my router.
Click to expand...

I have a Netgear DG834GT 108Mbps router at the moment. It is located in my bedroom where the main PC is. There i have shared my Seagate 7200rpm 1.5Tb HDD with the HTPC downstairs in the living room. The HTPC is connected to the router via RJ45. At the moment i am streaming 1080P HD material to the HTPC without any problems at all. Even FFD/RWD is fast.

Tell me more about NAS drives.....they any good for streaming stuff to HTPC/PS3? I heard they have a lower transfer rate and run into problems when more than 1 device is accessing data (HTPC & PS3). Is that true?
 
i know there's the 2tb limitation.

is this something that can be overcome, like the 127gb limitation that we used to have?

or do we need to wait for a new filesystem to take advantage (besides GPT)
 
It can be overcome but the only way to boot a GPT volume (as opposed to an MBR one) is to use EFI rather than a BIOS boot. At the minute the only machines that can do this are Intel Macs and Itanium based machines.

It's a huge leap from where we are now to the ability to boot >2Tb volumes - new hardware, new OS, the whole nine yards.
 
Zarf said:
Thanks to the fact that disks > 2TB have to use GPT to see all the space, and you can't boot from a GPT disk with any of the current windows versions, I'd say it'll be at least 5 years before there is enough of a market that manufacturers release them (at consumer prices - they may well release drives targeted for enterprise use).

I predict that mechanical drive manufacturers will refocus on 2.5" drives, and this is where platter density advancements will show up, we'll see a 2TB 2.5" HDD before we see a 3TB 3.5".
Click to expand...
Who'd be mad enough to make a boot volume larger than 2TB anyway?

As I understand, if, say a 4TB HD did exist, there's nothing stopping users making 2 equal sized partitions for 32bit OSes - or a 1TB NTFS boot partition and 3TB GPT data partition under 64bit.

HD speed increases over the years are negligible in comparison to capacity, and they're starting to lose big time in this area to SSDs anyway. You can bet your bottom dollar capacities will be the marketing push above 2TB and way beyond.
 
He's still got a point though :)

What's the problem with strapping several drives together as raid at the moment? I'm quite pleased with the 2.1tb volume Ive put together from four 750gb drives. When it runs out, I'll add a fifth 750 drive. When that finally runs out, I'll go to 3,4 or 5 larger drives also in raid 5.
 
Thats the route I have gone down.

When I start getting large media store I want resilience in there, not just one disk sat there with everything on it.

For most people then adding 2Tb drives into a pool either with Windows Home Server or some other form of media server will do the job.

Me I have gone down the DroboPro route, just got to get the Mac Mini in now. 4 x 500Gb RE2-GP drives fitted and waiting
 
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