2TB Drives?

[Kayden]

Anyone know whey they're going to come out with 2TB drives? When I look I can only find year+ old announcements saying they're coming 2009ish. My server is getting full and I need more room!

[billbob]

Dont have a clue, but i do know seagate is either bringing out or has already brought out a 1.5 TB drive, but 2TB will probibily come soon

[BossBorot]

there is a rumor currently floating around of 500gb platters for the comming seagate 7200.12 series. With 500gb platters they could reasonably build a 2-2.5tb drive.

However the 500gb platter test sample was only 5400rpm iirc. Also you run into the ntfs partition limit at 2gb but that is easy to fix unless you are running an older operating system

[tom10167]

I doubt we'd see a 2.5 at the same time we saw a 2. Business yo

1.5s have been out for a while. I'd love 2TB drives. ...I'd love 5TB drives to be honest.

[ps2cho]

How would one avoid the NTFS partition limit of 2TB? Just out of curiosity.

[Dapper Dan]

haxxors

[tom10167]

How would one avoid the NTFS partition limit of 2TB? Just out of curiosity.

I didn't know that existed. Would something like making a D: E:(virtual drive) do it?

[Maverick0984]

How would one avoid the NTFS partition limit of 2TB? Just out of curiosity.

The 2TB limit is actually because of something called the MBR (Master Boot Record). To bypass this limitation, the drive must be formatted using the GPT format.

AFAIK though, you are not able to boot from GPT.

[Moto7451]

A solution the OS X x86 guys came up with to use GPT formated disks as boot drives on purely BIOS systems was to use a boot loader that emulates the necessary EFI functionality. Granted, this still requires OS support which means Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008, newer *nix distros and the aforementioned not-allowed-to-be-discussed-in-here-when-installed-this-way Mac OS X.

Newer boards will probably get an EFI update if there isn't already one available. Intel boards are already mostly covered, especially if someone like Gateway (who has been using EFI for some time) is using the board. I'm not sure what AMD board makers will do. While I'm not trying to say that we should start looking for black helicopters, Intel and AMD's recent technological split related to SSE4, 5, and AVX (stupid in AMD's case might I add), makes it seem that AMD is getting a serious case of Not-invented-here syndrome and will prefer that their partners not use EFI. Obviously GPT is the way to go, but I have a feeling some manufacturers will simply tack on GPT support to their BIOSes even though EFI is a much better way of doing things.

The only reason why this will work out (unlike 3DNow!... er I mean SSE5) is because of the collective yawn the hardware industry seems to have in regards to EFI (basically they don't want to write a BIOS driver and EFI driver, which is why EFI supports legacy BIOS drivers). Until everyone is using EFI and it becomes a waste of time to write a BIOS driver, BIOS compatible hardware will be made. This of course comes much to the chagrin of Mac users who want to use cheap PC graphics cards and RAID cards haha (though the highpoint cards are quite nice and available at a reasonable price... but I digress). Macs lack the BIOS driver compatibility layer which makes sense from a marketing and support logistics standpoint but sure makes it difficult for someone who really just needs a $20 SATA card to add a few more ESATA drives.

[Kayden]

As already covered, MBR is the issue as I have an NTFS partition of 3TB using GPT. XP can access the whole thing with no issues, so only the system hosting the volume has to be GPT compatible.

How would one avoid the NTFS partition limit of 2TB? Just out of curiosity.

[Nickds7]

Who knows. I personally wouldn't buy one until the price drops to around $120-140 . Too much data to loose if a drive fails (and expensive to backup). :)