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Western Digital Releases a 3 Terabyte SATA Hard Drive

Want to upgrade to a massive internal hard drive? Western Digital has just announced their next drive, with a capacity of three terabytes.

As the latest addition to its WD Caviar® Green™ family of SATA hard drives (photo), the new hard drives deliver up to a massive 3 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity on a single drive. WD is leading the industry in capacity for SATA hard drives by utilizing 750 GB-per-platter areal density and Advanced Format (AF) technology.

Looks like it’ll be priced at $240 and should be available soon, if not now.

This Is the Largest SATA Drive In the World [Gizmodo]

Comments (11)

  1. Jon

    You can get a pair of 2TB drives for just shy of $200. That’s 4TB of data compared to 3TB. Much better deal.

  2. asdf-chan

    Not if you run raid and don’t have so many sata-slots free. I would prefer 2x3TB over 3x2TB.
    Besides i think i’ve heard that todays operating systems have a limit of max. 4TB per harddisk, true ||
    false?

  3. Huisie

    Does it come with a warning that NTFS has a BIOS boot limit of 2Tb?

    Those using this for a new install might be surprised…

  4. Huisie

    Following on from my post above:

    “…WD is planning to ship the new drives with UEFI and AHCI compliant Host Bus Adapters (HBA). A 64-bit OS is required to boot from the new drives, but 32-bit systems will still be able to use the drives as secondary storage…”

  5. LadyFitzgerald

    Am I the only one who can’t get into the above link?

  6. Jon

    @Huisie
    This is a 5400RPM drive. I would not use these to install an OS on. That wouldn’t be a very good idea.

    @asdf-chan
    I’m looking at the cost per GB. The 2TB drives are cheaper in that aspect. If you are talking RAID then even three 2TB drives in RAID 5 are cheaper ($300) than two 3TB drives in RAID 1 ($480). You have more usable storage, $180 more in your wallet and better performance.

  7. Earl

    “This Is the Largest SATA Drive In the World” should be “This Is the highest-capacity SATA Drive In the World”, assuming that it is physically a standard 3.5″ form factor.

  8. JK

    Doesn’t MBR drives max out at 2TB which means you have to format it as a GDP or something? And the latter takes DAYS to disk check. Currently I have 2TB*9=18TB of space and price wise I’m happy I chose the 2TB and disk check wise I’m even happier. I had a 2.2TB HDD and it wouldn’t let me format it as a MBR.

  9. rroberto18

    You have to buy 2 if you believe in backups, don’t you?

  10. ProstheticHead

    @LadyFitzgerald – Works OK for me.

    @Earl – I’m sorry but that’s being REALLY pedantic…

  11. William

    Watch out for the 3 T drive. They do not have sufficent drivers to even have their own WD Live TV recognise the drive. The customer support says a fix is months off. (probably summe 2011) I’ve wasted an enormus amount of time to find out that this was the problem. It beyond me why WD would release a product that their own products are incompatable with.

Programmer by day, geek by night, The Geek, also known as Lowell Heddings, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on if you'd like.

  • Published 10/19/10

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