neilt0 Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/19/wd_3tb_caviar_green/ "WD thrusts forth its mighty 3TB internal hardness New monster too big for Windows XP to take By Chris Mellor Posted in Storage, 19th October 2010 08:58 GMT Western Digital has unveiled the world's first 3TB internal drive, a Caviar Green model with four platters. This is a vast, astounding capacity, considering many desktop computer systems are operating with less than a terabyte of drive capacity. Seagate introduced its FreeAgent GoFlex 3TB drive in the summer and that was a huge announcement. WD announced its own 3TB external drive in My Book Essential and My Passport Essential form a couple of weeks ago. WD has pipped Seagate though, announcing an internal 3TB drive before its arch-competitor, and doing so with four platters and not the five needed by Seagate. A 3TB Barracuda XT from Seagate is expected by year-end. This means that WD has been able to reliably manufacture 750GB platters, spinning at 5400rpm, and with an areal density in the 500-550Gbit/in2 area. Its 2TB RE4-GP having around 400GBit/in2 and 500GB platters. Seagate's 3TB drive spins at a faster 7200rpm but it is a fourth generation PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording ) technology drive with 600GB per platter. The Caviar Green uses fifth generation PMR. The 3TB Caviar Green also comes in a 2.5TB version and both are Advanced Format drives that face problems being used by 32-bit versions of Windows and older PCs. WD says that drives larger than 2.2TB can be used as a primary boot drive or as secondary storage. To boot such a drive the host system has to have Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware. Most existing PCs don't have this, but systems shipping from the second quarter of next year onwards should have. Windows XP has problems in this area and is not being supported by these Caviar Green drives. It may support the drives' use as USB-connected external storage if a correct USB bridge is used. The 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7 support secondary storage use only. The 64-bit versions support booting from the drive when the host motherboard has the UEFI firmware. Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard support the drive for booting and secondary storage. The latest Linux distributions do so as well. WD's EVP and GM of its client systems storage group, Jim Morris, said: "Customers will be able to take advantage of [the new Caviar Green drives] for secondary external storage in legacy 32-bit systems that run on Microsoft Vista or Windows 7 platforms.” The drives come with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA). This enables the host O/S to use a known driver with correct support for large capacity drives. The 2.5TB and 3TB Caviar Green drives are available now with manufacturer's suggested retail pricing of $189 (£155) for the 2.5TB one and $239 (£195) for the 3TB product. Both have a three-year warranty. ®" Quote Link to comment
neilt0 Posted October 19, 2010 Author Share Posted October 19, 2010 StorageReview review: http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_3tb_review_wd30ezrsdtl Some snippets: WD Caviar Green 5th Generation Specs 2.5TB and 3TB capacities 5400 RPM 64MB cache 3MB/s SATA Power Consumption Spin Up - 10.75W Seek - 6.25W Idle - 5.5W Standby - 1W Average Read Seek - 15ms Average Latency - 5.5ms Spindle Start Time - 17s Error Rate - <1 in 1015 "We also tested the 3TB Caviar Green in two NAS units being tested in our lab, including a Synology DS411+ and a QNAP TS-459. Both models recognized the drive as a 3TB model and were eager to create a properly sized single partition on the drive. Neither seemed to throw as much of a fit as our Dell XPS 9000, which wouldn’t show more than a 746GB capacity with or without the HBA." "The new 3TB Caviar Green now consumes 3.89 watts at idle, from a previous 6.31 watts on the 2TB model. That’s almost half of what it was before! Write performance power use also dropped by about 1.5 watts, down to 5.69W. Another area that really improved was the startup power draw; albeit at the expense of a rather slow spin up speed. Previously the 2TB Caviar Green needed 14 watts to spin up, while the new 3TB model needs only 12.3w. So if you keep your server running constantly, the new 3TB Caviar green draws much less power sitting idle and stresses your system less when it spins up from a full power-saving state." Quote Link to comment
eroz Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Wow! Can't wait for the price to come down a bit. Quote Link to comment
bubbaQ Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 The article linked in the OP is more confusing than clarifying. Some of the statements seem logically inconsistent. It includes a controller card, but 32-bit Vista/Win7 can use it only as secondary storage, but 64-bit can boot from it. That's more than an issue with LBA48. It uses the standard AHCI interface, but XP can't use it? Needs EFI to boot it? .. .they why bundle a controller? If you are bundling a controller, you could do away with the limitations. It appears that they are not using 512byte translation as the EARS do, and are exposing the 4K sectors to the interface, but the controller they are bundling with it may not be exposing the 4K sectors to the OS. Use of the bundled controller may be an interim kludge to get this on the market before UEFI mobos are shipping.... which may be why no more smarts are being put into the controller to eliminate some of the restrictions that clearly could be overcome with the right smarts in the controller. I can't imagine many implementations care about booting this pig... I imagine most adopters in the desktop world are power users that are using an SSD for boot/OS drive and want this drive for storage. In the storage world, it obviously does not need to boot. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 The article linked in the OP is more confusing than clarifying. Some of the statements seem logically inconsistent. It includes a controller card, but 32-bit Vista/Win7 can use it only as secondary storage, but 64-bit can boot from it. That's more than an issue with LBA48. It uses the standard AHCI interface, but XP can't use it? Needs EFI to boot it? .. .they why bundle a controller? If you are bundling a controller, you could do away with the limitations. It appears that they are not using 512byte translation as the EARS do, and are exposing the 4K sectors to the interface, but the controller they are bundling with it may not be exposing the 4K sectors to the OS. Use of the bundled controller may be an interim kludge to get this on the market before UEFI mobos are shipping.... which may be why no more smarts are being put into the controller to eliminate some of the restrictions that clearly could be overcome with the right smarts in the controller. I can't imagine many implementations care about booting this pig... I imagine most adopters in the desktop world are power users that are using an SSD for boot/OS drive and want this drive for storage. In the storage world, it obviously does not need to boot. I will be curious to see what an "fdisk -l" shows for one of these drives. If by some miracle they "report" a legacy geometry that does not have cylinders of 63 sectors they might be usable in unRAID without it needing any changes. Who will be the first to order one? Joe L. Quote Link to comment
bubbaQ Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 I will be curious to see what an "fdisk -l" shows for one of these drives. I bet it will be different with their bundled controller, than with a standard SATA controller. But it all does not make sense. If you expose the 4K sectors, there is no LBA problem, and no need for long-ints and 64-bit OS. If you don't expose 4K sectors and do 512byte translation instead, then why bundle a controller, and how is it working as a data drive (nonbootable) in 32-bit Vista/Win7? Quote Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 It appears that they are not using 512byte translation as the EARS do, and are exposing the 4K sectors to the interface, but the controller they are bundling with it may not be exposing the 4K sectors to the OS. The review has a couple of 4k aligned vs not aligned tests which seems to indicate the drive is still exposing 512k sectors. The datasheet shows 5,860,533,168 sectors which would also correspond to the interface exposing 512b sectors. Peter Quote Link to comment
neilt0 Posted October 19, 2010 Author Share Posted October 19, 2010 The article linked in the OP is more confusing than clarifying. Some of the statements seem logically inconsistent. It includes a controller card Not with the OEM version though: "they're including an AHCI-compliant host bus adapter (HBA) card with the retail drive kits." Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 WD says that drives larger than 2.2TB can be used as a primary boot drive or as secondary storage. To boot such a drive the host system has to have Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware. Most existing PCs don't have this, but systems shipping from the second quarter of next year onwards should have. Looks like we're in for a major MB overhaul in the near future. Might not be the best time to buy a new one (or, depending on how you look at it, may soon be a great time to get a bargain motherboad). Quote Link to comment
bubbaQ Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 This article says there is 512byte translation, but it is unclear if that is done at the drive, or at the HBA. http://hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1576 Quote Link to comment
starknetwork Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Motherboards and Unraid aside, will controllers need to be compatible with these? (specifically AOC-SASLP-MV8)? I ask as I am looking to upgrade to one of these controllers soon, but just wondering if they will be useless with 3TB drives, meaning later on I would possibly need to upgrade Motherboard and controller? Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Who will be the first to order one? Joe L. I think the guy who wrote the pre-clear script should order and test one. He's very good at this stuff. Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Looks like we're in for a major MB overhaul in the near future. Might not be the best time to buy a new one (or, depending on how you look at it, may soon be a great time to get a bargain motherboad). I would think there will be special controllers to handle this scenario. I remember years ago when motherboards could not handle > 8GB, you bought a special GSI controller and you were up and running. A major deciding factor is if you really need to boot from one of these drives. Then motherboard support becomes paramount. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Who will be the first to order one? Joe L. I think the guy who wrote the pre-clear script should order and test one. He's very good at this stuff. That guy is too poor... $250 is a lot of money to throw away on an experiment. I'm sure he'll accept one or two as a donation though if you ask him nicely Quote Link to comment
bubbaQ Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Doing some more research, it seems that WD determined that a number of HBA and chipset drivers were not LBA48 safe... or were at least questionable. That is the reason for the bundled HBA. So they are not exposing the 4K sectors. If you look at their matrix, you need their bundled HBA, on all OS combos, including 64-bit Linux and Mac OS X, even where GPT partitions are fully supported by the OS. Quote Link to comment
kenoka Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 I'm sure he'll accept one or two as a donation though if you ask him nicely You're probably joking, but that's not a bad idea. We could all donate a bit to a paypal account. Quote Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Once again, 5,860,533,168 sectors on the 3T drive corresponds to 512b per sector. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701229.pdf An easy check is that the 3T has 2x the sectors of the 1.5T or 3x the sectors if the 1T drives which seems to indicate that all these drives are exposing 512b sectors and the new ones are not exposing 4k sectors on their SATA port. If you look at their matrix, you need their bundled HBA, on all OS combos, including 64-bit Linux and Mac OS X, even where GPT partitions are fully supported by the OS. Odd, the chart I looked at says No for the HBA on Mac OS X v10.5 and v10.6. Peter Quote Link to comment
mbryanr Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Odd, the chart I looked at says No for the HBA on Mac OS X v10.5 and v10.6. Peter Windows and some Linux variants hit the 2.19TB capacity limit because they can only address 232 logical blocks (OSX is not affected by this limitation).....Moving to GPT partitions allows for up to 18 Exabyte (264) of Logical Block Addressing (OSX is already there) http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_3tb_review_wd30ezrsdtl Quote Link to comment
bubbaQ Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 Odd, the chart I looked at says No for the HBA on Mac OS X v10.5 and v10.6. Correct... I had fat fingers. I meant to say that the HBA is required for all but Mac OS X, and for all, including 64-bit Mac and Linux, support is ONLY verified with the OS, and not with any applications. This is a very cautionary tale, that WD found problems with device drivers and chipsets not being LBA48 safe. With the "roll-your-own" nature of unRAID, compatibility will be a crapshoot. Quote Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 FYI, the WD card is a HighPoint Rocket 620. Peter Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 I'm sure he'll accept one or two as a donation though if you ask him nicely You're probably joking, but that's not a bad idea. We could all donate a bit to a paypal account. I would be willing. Quote Link to comment
Blofeld Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 I'm sure he'll accept one or two as a donation though if you ask him nicely You're probably joking, but that's not a bad idea. We could all donate a bit to a paypal account. I would be willing. dito. Quote Link to comment
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