[Brian]

Seagate recently started shipping their 3TB Barracuda XT, which with the Hitachi 7K3000, make up the first wave of performance oriented 3TB hard drives. The implications of 3TB capacities are big, consumers now have 50% more capacity to work with on a single drive, purportedly without giving up performance. Up to this month, the only other 3TB option was Western Digital's Caviar Green, but it's not designed to hum along at the same pace. The 3TB Barracuda XT has a lot going for it - a 7,200 RPM spin speed, 64MB cache and updated SATA 6Gb/s interface combine to deliver sustained transfer rates of 149 MB/s. Seagate is also making the 2.2TB barrier less of an issue by including a software package to make the drive compatible with legacy operating systems.

Full Review

[DetlevCM]

Brian, on 17 March 2011 - 11:09 AM, said:

Seagate recently started shipping their 3TB Barracuda XT, which with the Hitachi 7K3000, make up the first wave of performance oriented 3TB hard drives. The implications of 3TB capacities are big, consumers now have 50% more capacity to work with on a single drive, purportedly without giving up performance. Up to this month, the only other 3TB option was Western Digital's Caviar Green, but it's not designed to hum along at the same pace. The 3TB Barracuda XT has a lot going for it - a 7,200 RPM spin speed, 64MB cache and updated SATA 6Gb/s interface combine to deliver sustained transfer rates of 149 MB/s. Seagate is also making the 2.2TB barrier less of an issue by including a software package to make the drive compatible with legacy operating systems.

Full Review

I'm just thinking - any chance you could get to test those 3TB drives with Windows Home Server (1, 2)

-> Home Server users will like to add the largest drives available provided the price is right (i.e. not hellishly overpriced) and it would be interesting to see if it works well.

[Brian]

We don't have a WHS unit in house right now, but there may be some things we can do to at least do some compatibility testing.

[DetlevCM]

Brian, on 19 March 2011 - 12:58 PM, said:

We don't have a WHS unit in house right now, but there may be some things we can do to at least do some compatibility testing.

Too bad, you should have one handy although my guess is, if it runs on Server 2003 or older, it will run on Windows Home Server 1

If it runs on Server 2008 (not sure if R2) it will run on Windows Home Server 2, although the question is whether the drive extender add-on that people have written will work with it.

[Datasaurus]

I remember being ASTONISHED when I bought my first 750 GB HDD. I thought I would NEVER fill it up.

[TSullivan]

Datasaurus, on 20 March 2011 - 02:40 PM, said:

I remember being ASTONISHED when I bought my first 750 GB HDD. I thought I would NEVER fill it up.

You think is crazy, we have a 40MB hard drive sitting on the table at work. That is 75,000 times smaller in capacity than the 3TB's sitting next to it

[Spod]

So if the software depends on having the latest Intel storage drivers loaded... what happens if you're not using an Intel controller? I understand what OSes can use GPT for boot and data, but how do the dependencies for MBR use of 3 TB drives work? Is there a controller dependency for 3 TB drives even if the OS supports GPT?

[Binnacle]

Just dropped one of these into a Rosewill/NewEgg USB3-to-SATA2
dock that incorporates the ASMedia ASM1051 bridge. The drive is
presented by the bridge as having 4096 byte logical sectors even
though the drive itself speaks 512 byte LBA48-addressed sectors.

Interestingly a simple 'dd iflag=direct' read test ran at
157 MB/sec--quite a bit faster than the review result.

Also interesting was that the same test ran at 134 MB/sec
when the drive was attached to the same system via the
SATA2 interface integrated on the Dell T105 mainboard
(AMD chipset).

In the USB3 scenario, the host-side was handled by an
ASMedia ASM1042 PCIe HBA (RocketU 1144A card).

So in this case USB3 is faster than SATA2.