October 4, 201015 yr From http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=694 ...we have just confirmed that Western Digital will be launching their 3TB hard disk drives in mid-October. The exact date has not yet been determined but it will happen in the next 2-3 weeks.
October 4, 201015 yr WD is playing with fire. WD appears to be rolling out 3TB drives intending them to work on systems using existing long-int LBA, which will allow it to work with existing BIOS and operating systems. That's fine and dandy, except that many programs (nee, programmers) have hardcoded 512 byte sectors as an assumption. Programmers should not have done that, but the fact is they did.... in a lot of places. Even where the programmer properly queried the actual sector size, there are a bunch of bugs waiting to rise up with memory allocations that weren't given the same careful attention. WD can cry and point fingers at the programs (nee, programmers) as being at fault (and WD will be correct, technically) when those programs choke and corrupt data on WD's 3TB drives, but the consumer will be blaming WD. Seagate is still suffering from the firmware fiasco... and that episode could look like child's play if WD is not careful.
October 5, 201015 yr WD is playing with fire. WD appears to be rolling out 3TB drives intending them to work on systems using existing long-int LBA, which will allow it to work with existing BIOS and operating systems. That's fine and dandy, except that many programs (nee, programmers) have hardcoded 512 byte sectors as an assumption. Programmers should not have done that, but the fact is they did.... in a lot of places. Even where the programmer properly queried the actual sector size, there are a bunch of bugs waiting to rise up with memory allocations that weren't given the same careful attention. WD can cry and point fingers at the programs (nee, programmers) as being at fault (and WD will be correct, technically) when those programs choke and corrupt data on WD's 3TB drives, but the consumer will be blaming WD. Seagate is still suffering from the firmware fiasco... and that episode could look like child's play if WD is not careful. Seagate already beat them to the punch. The drives are sold as external only, but people are pulling them out and using them as internal drives and dealing with some of the issues you touched on. For savvy people, you can work around it, especially if it is just a storage drive. But yeah, I'm sure there will be thousands of people who have no clue at all that they should be concerned, and they will scream bloody murder when they can't plug and play the drive.
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