when will 2TB drives have same £/GB?

Namak

Namak

Namak

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Running out of space slowly but surely and would ideally like to move to 2TB drives so that I have plenty of spare capacity to move stuff around and organise.....

1.5TBs seem to have now fallen to same £ per GB as 1 TBs. This seemed to have taken about a year since release....

2TBs have been out a fair few months now. just wondering how long people think it will take for these drives to equal £ per GB parity with 1 or 1.5 TB drives? Also will this depend on when 2.5TBs or 3TBs come out?

So yeah what do you think? 5 or 6 months? More or less?
 
Probably more. Larger drives are less likely to hit market soon IMO than between 1.5tb and 2tb because there's an MFT limitation meaning partitions over 2tb aren't bootable, which I suspect will slow their production. And while they are coming down in price, they've been around for ages now - must be around 6 months at least - and they've only come down in price by about £40 (they were just under £200 on release). Plus a 1.5TB was recently available for £70.. much cheaper/GB than 1tb :D
 
Thanks! That was a pretty comprehensive answer.

How will they get around the MFT issue? Is that a service pack fix?

I must have missed that 1.5TB offer. was it a TWO? I guess I may just have to keep my eyes out for another deal like that!

I seem to end up spending more on HDDs than the rest of my components together!
 
I only heard about it the day after it ended - it was a one-day-only offer at a competitor.
The MFT problem is nothing to do with the OS - it's a file system problem. You can create larger partitions by using GPT instead of MFT (this is an option when you initialise the disk in Disk Management), but you need an Itanium-based motherboard to support booting from GPT. It's not really that big an issue though IMO because, let's be honest, who's going to have a 2TB drive and put their OS on it? Practically everyone will have a second, smaller, HDD (can't figure out at the moment if you could put one 2TB partition and one 500GB partition on a 2.5tb HDD and have it bootable :confused:)

Me too, I must've spent about £700 or more on my HDDs :eek:
 
Hi Miniyazz -again thanks for your answer but wow I thought my storage demands were high but just seen your sig.

11.5tb!!!! What do you keep on that? The whole Internet????? either that or that is some pron collection.
 
Namak said:
Hi Miniyazz -again thanks for your answer but wow I thought my storage demands were high but just seen your sig.

11.5tb!!!! What do you keep on that? The whole Internet????? either that or that is some pron collection.
Click to expand...

Now you come to mention it, I do recall mention of someone on here trying to archive the internet's collection of pron :D

Basically I have an extensive library of high-quality DVD/High-Def rips. Being at Uni there's no space for the disks themselves, have to leave them at home, so I've sorted myself out a RAID 5 array with 4x1.5TB disks which fits everything, plus several hundred GB of general backups (no idea how they take up so much space:confused:)
Then I have another 4.5TB, just a duplicate of the RAID5 array cos I'd be ****ed if it went down mid-term, plus I'd have to re-rip everything. Add a few portable HDDs, and it soon adds up..:D:D
 
miniyazz said:
Now you come to mention it, I do recall mention of someone on here trying to archive the internet's collection of pron :D

Basically I have an extensive library of high-quality DVD/High-Def rips. Being at Uni there's no space for the disks themselves, have to leave them at home, so I've sorted myself out a RAID 5 array with 4x1.5TB disks which fits everything, plus several hundred GB of general backups (no idea how they take up so much space:confused:)
Then I have another 4.5TB, just a duplicate of the RAID5 array cos I'd be ****ed if it went down mid-term, plus I'd have to re-rip everything. Add a few portable HDDs, and it soon adds up..:D:D
Click to expand...

sounds like a lot of porn to me :p
 
miniyazz said:
I only heard about it the day after it ended - it was a one-day-only offer at a competitor.
The MFT problem is nothing to do with the OS - it's a file system problem. You can create larger partitions by using GPT instead of MFT (this is an option when you initialise the disk in Disk Management), but you need an Itanium-based motherboard to support booting from GPT. It's not really that big an issue though IMO because, let's be honest, who's going to have a 2TB drive and put their OS on it? Practically everyone will have a second, smaller, HDD (can't figure out at the moment if you could put one 2TB partition and one 500GB partition on a 2.5tb HDD and have it bootable :confused:)

Me too, I must've spent about £700 or more on my HDDs :eek:
Click to expand...
You could do 2TB+500GB as the MFT limitation is part of the NTFS file system rather than the MBR partitioning system of the hard disk. Hence if you use Linux with ext3/4 and a 4K block size you can boot off up to 16TB.

After 16TB, who knows?
 
miniyazz said:
you need an Itanium-based motherboard to support booting from GPT. It's not really that big an issue though IMO because, let's be honest, who's going to have a 2TB drive and put their OS on it? Practically everyone will have a second, smaller, HDD
Click to expand...

In the short term this is probably true, only enthusiasts will be packing 2TB+ drives. However such a limitation could still limit long-term scaleability, as OEMs are likely to be wary of it and in general demand would be subdued slightly. Disks which are once pretty rare and expensive (say 500GB) and now shipping with desktops. In a few years (barring any such limitations), you'd expect 2TB drives to be in that position.
 
andrewdodd13 said:
You could do 2TB+500GB as the MFT limitation is part of the NTFS file system rather than the MBR partitioning system of the hard disk. Hence if you use Linux with ext3/4 and a 4K block size you can boot off up to 16TB.

After 16TB, who knows?
Click to expand...

Nice :)

I imagine that Windows will either develop/use a new file system without MFT limitations or motherboards will start including support for GPT booting.
 
Would it be possible to partition a 2gb disk with a small, say 100gb partition and get it to boot or is the problem to do with 2gb per-se?

I thought I had a lot of storage, I have 4Tb (2 500gb drives in RAID0 and 2 1.5tb standalone HDDs) in the home machine with 1.5Tb available via NAS, seems I've got quite a way to go to get up to 11.5Tb :D
 
The problem with hard drives is backup - although the £/GB drops, you need to double it to take into account that you'll need to back it up, even accounting for the fact that some isn't necessary to backup.

Ignoring my system partition, I've got some 300GB on a 500GB drive, but if I want to keep grandfather-father-son backups of some more important data, suddenly I need another drive of equal size just to be secure with it.

I could survive with only backing up my documents, but my house isn't too organised and I don't want to be having to rip hundreds of CDs and DVDs all over again.

At the moment I'm actually putting my laptop drive into the PC occasionally to back up my important documents etc, but I'd still lose 300GB of DVD rips as I prefer to keep the VOB files instead of an AVI etc.
 
if you have a disc/array largter than 2tb (lets say 4), and partition say 100gb for windows, it will boot into that, but you can only format the other 1.9tb of the disc, the other space stays there as unpartitioned space and isnt formatable with acronis, vista boot thing, in vista etc. This is why I have to take one drive out of my raid 5 array and have it as a seperate boot and installed games drive :( Can't wait till i can afford an ssd (aiming for october for win7) so that I can put my 5th drive into my raid array. Also need a bootable 2 port sata card though since ive filled up my 6 mobo ports :(
 
Not sure about this at all. I have four 750gb drives in raid 5, at 2.1tb. It is formatted as a single ext2 partition with no problems at all. I'm absolutely sure that if I add another disk I'll get a 2.8tb single volume, perhaps the issue you're facing lies with windows?

I'm aware of the 2tb boot volume limit, but I'm pretty certain it doesn't extend to "no partition over 2tb"
 
You can't make an NTFS partition larger than 2tb, and you can't boot off a GPT-formatted partition. But you can make a GPT partition as large as you want (up to something stupid measured in exobytes IIRC). You would certainly be able to make a 100GB partition and a 1.9TB partition with your 2TB drive and be able to boot off the 100GB partition. What you wouldn't be able to do is have a 100MB bootable partition and a 2.5TB partition, because GPT is set on a whole-disk basis.
 
miniyazz said:
You can't make an NTFS partition larger than 2tb, and you can't boot off a GPT-formatted partition. But you can make a GPT partition as large as you want (up to something stupid measured in exobytes IIRC). You would certainly be able to make a 100GB partition and a 1.9TB partition with your 2TB drive and be able to boot off the 100GB partition. What you wouldn't be able to do is have a 100MB bootable partition and a 2.5TB partition, because GPT is set on a whole-disk basis.
Click to expand...

this is what i meant, but explained with reasoning :)
 
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