October 13, 201114 yr http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/13/seagate_5tb_drives/ "Did a Seagate sales bloke just say 5TB drives are coming? Talks up big disks within three months in web vid By Chris Mellor Posted in Storage, 13th October 2011 11:14 GMT Has a Seagate Middle East sales guy just let slip that 5TB drives will be here in three months? He's identified on a video uploaded to YouTube as "Christian from Seagate", and his video interview has been mentioned on Twitter. The Tbreak video, below, records an interview at GITEX '11, a technology event in Dubai. Seagate has a Christian Assaf as its channel sales manager for Middle East and Africa, according to a LinkedIn entry, and he looks like the guy in the video. A Google image search throws up more pictures. Here is a transcript of the relevant part of the video, about six minutes in: "Now we have 1TB per disk. If you just do a simple calculation ... now a drive can have five disks ... so suddenly you make the disk 5TB ... within three months you will see it." Seagate has a Constellation ES.2 3.5-inch drive which holds 3TB on its five platters as well as a similar 5-platter 3TB Barracuda XT. It looks like we've just seen a product pre-announcement. El Reg has asked Seagate for a comment. ® Bootnote Since we published this, a Seagate spokesman has been in touch to say: "It is hardly a revelation that hard drive capacities will increase in the future or that sometime soon there will be a 5TB offering."
October 14, 201114 yr I'll vent again. Come on unRAID! Let's get 3TB support in a stable release! Ok, better.
October 14, 201114 yr You only want 3TB support. I'd prefer 3TB+ support myself. You guys are so greedy--all you need is 2.1991 TB support. Beyond that is effortless, and will be the end of this saga. At least till after a lot of us are "eating dirt" (and there's a replacement for the current (S)ATA spec [48-bit LBA]). The present hurdle is that LBA (sector) addresses have been stored (and manipulated) [within drivers, filesystems, BIOS, or whatever] as 32-bit (long unsigned) integers. That is where the 2TB+ difficulty arises. (Some of you already know this, but) I thought I'd provide an explanation for all this agony. [E.g. 2^32 (max # sectors) X 2^9 (512 byte/LBA[sector]) = 2^41 bytes = 2.19902TB] Once everything is cleaned up (and stable) to use 64-bit entities, this headache just fades away (and becomes just another entry in geek-history). PS The 4KB sector vs 512-byte sector thing does not enter into this discussion. Just trust me on that one. --UhClem "Doing base 8 arithmetic is easy! (if you're missing two fingers)" -T.L.
October 14, 201114 yr Even if they are out in 3 months the other question is how much $$$. Given that the 4 TB (external) now is at US$200 - you can easily have 6TB (3 x 2TB) with less $ or again 6TB (2 x 3TB) with a little bit more $.
October 15, 201114 yr @UhClem - apparently you did not understand my attempt at humor. Yes, in a sense.
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