3TB WD drives

sybaris · 19 Mar 2011 at 17:00

Im thinking of getting a 3 TB drive as my 1.5 is almost full.
I remember when the 2TBs came out they were initially 2x1TB stuck together.
Are the 3TBs genuinely 3TB or 2 drives attached to each other?

Surveyor · 19 Mar 2011 at 17:53

I don't think any HDD has been 2 stuck together :confused:

All hard drives are made up from a number of platters.

The WD 2TB drives originally had 4x500GB platters and now have 3x667GB platters.

The WD 3TB drives have 4x750GB platters and will stay that way until they can produce a 1TB platter.

sybaris · 19 Mar 2011 at 18:39

Im sure I have read that when either the 1tb or the 2tb drives hit the market, they were in effect, two drives engineered together.

Surveyor · 19 Mar 2011 at 18:44

sybaris said:
Im sure I have read that when either the 1tb or the 2tb drives hit the market, they were in effect, two drives engineered together.

I can't really comment on that.

What does concern me is that you want a 3TB drive because your 1.5TB is nearly full. Does this mean you have a 1.5TB drive with no backup and now want to fill a 3TB drive without backup?

Justintime · 19 Mar 2011 at 20:43

sybaris said:
Im sure I have read that when either the 1tb or the 2tb drives hit the market, they were in effect, two drives engineered together.

What and then squished to a 3.5 form factor?

They're just normal drives with platters with high density, for instance i think some 3tb hdds hav 750gb per platter, so 4 platters etc..

JonJ678 · 19 Mar 2011 at 20:49

A few WD external drives have been easily large enough to hold two drives, so it's entirely possible that some of them featured two entirely separate drives plugged into a single pcb.

As for your OP, I think the following is pretty self explanatory.

Justintime · 19 Mar 2011 at 22:10

JonJ678 said:
A few WD external drives have been easily large enough to hold two drives, so it's entirely possible that some of them featured two entirely separate drives plugged into a single pcb.

As for your OP, I think the following is pretty self explanatory.

Except we're not talking about that are we? I'm sure the op meant internal drives. You're just talking about RAID 0 NAS boxes or something.

JonJ678 · 19 Mar 2011 at 22:21

I don't know whether the OP has an internal or an external drive in mind, as he hasn't said either way.

Since the only WD products I can think of which could be described as two hard drives stuck together are the my book world's from a few years back, it seems possible those are what the OP was referring to.

sybaris · 20 Mar 2011 at 09:20

Surveyor said:
What does concern me is that you want a 3TB drive because your 1.5TB is nearly full. Does this mean you have a 1.5TB drive with no backup and now want to fill a 3TB drive without backup?

I never said I have no backup. All my data is backed up.
I have a SATA removable drive bay and rule number one is backup your data. Infact I mirror critical data, and I run regular full backups.
Not your differential or incremental too.
Just to be on the safe side I keep off site backups also.

I wrote the book on backups for a certain ftse 100 company running 2x8 drive, 120 bay robotic libraries per site, across multiple sites, and found design flaws in quantum's units that had quantum re-design them.

So I may not be the best over clocker, or the best network guru, but if there is one topic I do/did know (when I was a techie), it is data backup.

sybaris · 20 Mar 2011 at 09:23

After a little more digging, I think it may not have been WD but possibly Maxtor with their very first 1tb drives. I think a lot of reviews at the time mentioned they were 2x500gb.

Surveyor · 20 Mar 2011 at 11:09

sybaris said:
I wrote the book on backups for a certain ftse 100 company

Oooooh! Can I buy a copy?

Does it explain the difference between HDD's and NAS devices?

Maxtor produced a 1TB NAS device with 2x500GB drives. That's not the same as a 1TB drive.

Western digital now produce a 4TB NAS device with 2x2TB drives. That's not the same as a 4TB drive.

Justintime · 20 Mar 2011 at 15:13

Exactly

Funny how many ignorant people i know wrote a book or worked with IBM/Microsoft etc..

milkinc13 · 20 Mar 2011 at 16:24

Justintime said:
Exactly Funny how many ignorant people i know wrote a book or worked with IBM/Microsoft etc..

I know that guy as well

back to op, how can you "stick" 2 hard drives together?

is it like the PS3 which was a PS1 and PS2 masking taped together?

a 3TB drive is 1 drive with high density platters inside. Simples!

DragonQ · 20 Mar 2011 at 17:32

Some external drives, like the one pictured above, are simply two HDDs in RAID 0. Tis obvious if this is the case though, cos they're so huge.

Current 3 TB standard internal drives (3.5") are made of 4x 750 GB platters I think. Samsung's upcoming F6 series (including EcoGreen) will feature 1 TB platters for capacities up to 4 TB.