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3TB SATA drives

Mattww

Mattww

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 11, 2008
395
19
I see Seagate & WD have announced these but I'm struggling to find many available to order. Only the WD Green one appears to be even offered as an internal option. What is more it is more expensive buying the internal drive than buying the external USB one.

Has anyone bought one of these externals and stripped out the drive to put in their Mac Pro? I'm running out of space on my 1.5TB and swopping to 2TB hardly seems enough.
 
Mattww said:
I see Seagate & WD have announced these but I'm struggling to find many available to order. Only the WD Green one appears to be even offered as an internal option. What is more it is more expensive buying the internal drive than buying the external USB one.

Has anyone bought one of these externals and stripped out the drive to put in their Mac Pro? I'm running out of space on my 1.5TB and swopping to 2TB hardly seems enough.
Click to expand...

was going to rip them apart ? but decided not to
got some Samsung F4 drives 2TB $89 at newegg

but I have external cases ?

I have bought seagate external and ripped them apart before ? not to tough to do and the drives are the drives

I know frys.com had the 3TB for $199

I would like to get my HDD use down on the numbers I have so decided I am retiring all of my 750s I have (over 20 of them) very soon when the 3TB come down a bit more in price and the faster ones come out ! figuring 1/4 ratio thats pretty good savings in heat and power in our office :)

I would say if you want it now ? get the externals and take them apart I think anandtech ripped one apart to test the bare drive ? not very good performance though ? but better than older HDD


the new F4 2TB I got was amazed using AJA I was getting about 120-130 MB/s thats pretty impressive for a slow low power HDD
 
I'd be a bit cautious about them for the moment - at least I wouldn't use a 3TB drive to store important information: a) they are quite new, and based on new technology, so fail rate is still unknown. And b) As I see here, there are still some unresolved OS compatibility issues with such drives and OS X.

Buyer beware....

I'd stick with the reliable 2TB drives for now... or keep the 3TB in the enclosure it came with.
 
diazj3 said:
I'd be a bit cautious about them for the moment - at least I wouldn't use a 3TB drive to store important information: a) they are quite new, and based on new technology, so fail rate is still unknown.
Click to expand...

The fail rate for all mechanical hard drives is pretty much known. 100%.
They all will fail, it's just a matter of time.
:p

But still, "new technology"? What exactly is new in the 3TB models, except for the increased density (they use 5 600GB platters afaik)?
 
diazj3 said:
As I see here, there are still some unresolved OS compatibility issues with such drives and OS X.
Click to expand...

I didn't see anything in there about compatibility issues with such drives and OS X.

In fact, all of the issues brought up about problems with Windows are supported in OS X (GPT and EFI).
 
i've been running a 3tb wd green as my boot drive for a few weeks now on a 2008 mac pro. there've been no problems so far, and it's much faster than the 2tb black i was running on before (of course the black was choking with data - it had 180gb free)

bought it from newegg the day they came out.
 
ActionableMango said:
I didn't see anything in there about compatibility issues with such drives and OS X.

In fact, all of the issues brought up about problems with Windows are supported in OS X (GPT and EFI).
Click to expand...


khollister said:
Yup - looks like clear sailing to me too.
Click to expand...


See the small footprint... as I understand it, there are some issues - unless you are not running bootcamp. But anyway, I guess they will become issue-free with time... I just tend to be a bit careful before trusting my work data to new products. Personally, I think I'll wait until 3TB drives become a standard before trusting them fully.

cheers!
 

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Do you only have 1 drive or more? because if you have 4 1.5TB drives, replacing with 2TB will yield a total of 2TB extra. If you have less than four, just throw in another drive.
 
I've got a 2TB and two 1.5TB plus my SSD boot drive - I've also got two optical drives installed and as it is a 2009 model that leave me with no free SATA connectors. I'd rather keep as much as possible internal so I can keep my externals for TM and clone backups.
 
We're building 24.0 TB RAID's with them now. They work great and read speeds are around 790 MB/s.

They are taking about 10 hours to fully RAID up, but we expected that.

TL
 
I'm using the new 3TB Green in OS X and Win 7 via Boot Camp now. In general it is working well.

There are a few odd issues though with certain partition schemes and how Win 7 sees the drive. I didn't completely figure it out before I settled on something that would work for me. (2 TB exFAT, 250GB NTFS, 750GB HFS+).

Basically though anything past the 2TB mark was not showing up correctly in the Windows Disk Manager. The exception seemed to be if the drive was formatted with a single partition. It's a little odd, and I don't pretend to understand this stuff at a deep enough level to really grasp what was going on.

I'm only using this disk for a online backup disk, so what I ended up doing was formatting in OS X Disk Manager as 2TB exFAT, 250GB exFAT, 750GB HFS+.

Then in Win 7 it comes up at 2TB exFAT and a 250GB unformatted (that you can format), and a 750GB unformatted (that it won't let you touch or access). I formatted the 250GB to NTFS so I could get full images of my Win 7 box. The HFS+ partition I can't access at all from Win 7, but as it is only used for Time Machine I have no need to access it from Win 7 anyway. I never managed to get any partition over 2TB's to work when I had more than 1 partition on the drive.

Quite odd as none of these issues existed on my 2TB green drive. Some of it might be related to exFAT as I was mostly testing with that, as it was something I wanted to use, but oddly a single 3TB exFAT partition works just fine!
 
For those of you who already have these 3TB drives are they generally compatible with external SATA docks & enclosures?

I've got a Newertech Voyager Q and Macally FW800 enclosure so for backing up an internal I'm undecided about another bare drive versus an external plus a USB 3.0 PCI-E card with third party drivers (general try to avoid these when possible in case they break with OS updates).
 
WD Caviar Green is currently the only 3TB drive that is available as bare drive. 3TB Seagate is only available as an external drive. Hitachi has also released their 3TB drive but it seems to be unavailable at the moment.

If you want it now, go with WD
 
Hellhammer said:
If you want it now, go with WD
Click to expand...

I agree with this, I'd wait though. At least here in Europe the prices for the 3TB WD Green are absolutely insane. They are sold for about 280€, whereas the 2TB Green drives are sold for less than 80€.

3.5 times as much for only 50% more capacity? :confused:
They will become considerably cheaper in the next month, so unless you really need the capacity now, go with 2TB drives for now and upgrade later next year. Everything else is a waste of money.
 
Transporteur said:
I agree with this, I'd wait though. At least here in Europe the prices for the 3TB WD Green are absolutely insane. They are sold for about 280€, whereas the 2TB Green drives are sold for less than 80€.

3.5 times as much for only 50% more capacity? :confused:
They will become considerably cheaper in the next month, so unless you really need the capacity now, go with 2TB drives for now and upgrade later next year. Everything else is a waste of money.
Click to expand...

Yup. When 3TB is closer to 2TB in $/GB, then it's worth it to get it instead of 2TB. Now you can get three 2TBs for the price of one 3TB so you actually get twice as much storage, 6TB.

Hopefully Hitachi will price their 3TB competitively so there will be some competition on 3TB segment. Now it's dominated by WD when it comes to bare drives
 
Not sure I would want a 3tb drive until sata III or USB 3 comes out. Took me 10 hrs just to back up 1.5 TB of files. Hate to see what a full 3TB would take.
 
bearcatrp said:
Not sure I would want a 3tb drive until sata III or USB 3 comes out. Took me 10 hrs just to back up 1.5 TB of files. Hate to see what a full 3TB would take.
Click to expand...

once done use incremental BU then it will be quite quick I backup a 5TB volume all the time depending on how many files I worked on that day its not to slow ? but then my connections are all quick
 
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