New Computer Hard Drive Information

1TB external portable hard drive information

Things are really moving fast in the hard disk drive environment. Vendors are already pushing out 3TB drives and I suspect that bigger versions are already on the way.

So what about portable drives? Manufacturers are not standing still. You can now buy a 1 TB external hard drive with either USB 2.0 or 3.0 interface. While USB 3.0 sounds great, it hasn't really been used widely. This will change, of course, and USB 3.0 will soon be the standard in desktop and mobile devices. It's just a question of time.

Vendors of motherboards and controllers will catch on and embed the new USB 3.0 technology in systems. Don't despair, there are a lot of new mobile and desktop system coming out with USB 3.0. Just check the vendors website before you buy.

I would strongly suggest that you get a laptop or motherboard with USB 3.0 support as this will be the new standard in the future.

What is USB 3.0? USB 3.0 is similar to USB2.0 with some enhancements. These include:

Higher transfer rates. The specification caters for up to 5 Gb/s but realistically you probably get 3.2Gb/s. This also depends on what hardware you currently have. With USB2.0 you would probably get 480Mb/s. So there's a huge speed improvement.

Hot Swappable. USB3.0 and 2.0 can be hot swapped. This means you do not need to shut you system down to remove you hard disk.

USB powered. USB3.0 and 2.0 are bus powered. This means that you can power the external device via USB. No separate power supply needed. USB3.0 also supports higher voltages to power external devices.

Backward compatible. USB3.0 is compatible with USB2.0. Just remember that you will not get the performance of USB3.0.

These drives have capacities ranging from 500GB to 1TB and some vendors even sell 1.5TB portable hard drives. Check out Western Digital and Seagate websites. They have a wealth of information on their disks.

Massive 3TB disks available

New Hard Drive Information. It was just a question of time before larger than 2TB disks became available. Vendors such as Seagate and Western Digital are already producing these massive drives.

These disks are 3.5" in size and runs at 3 Gb/s to 6Gb/s. They also have a cache size between 16 MB and 64 MB.

The drives are available as internal storage or external desktop storage and spins at 7200 RPM.

This is a really cool development from these vendors and others. You can load much more games, music, videos and data on these disks. This is also great for disk to disk backups or just secondary storage such as volume copies or archives.

Just make sure that your operating system supports these new drives. Operating systems such as Windows XP will only see 2.1TB and there are no plans to change this. You might be able to get a HBA (Host Bus Adapter) that supports the bigger capacity. This might become a expensive exercise as you now need to buy a disk and controller.

The thing is that windows XP only sees 2to the power of 32 logical blocks x (512 sector size), so if you do the math you only get to 2.19TB size.

Booting current Windows OS's with large capacity drives require a motherboard or system with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) using Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) Partitions. For this you require a 64-bit version of Windows or other OS's.

Rather upgrade to a OS such as Windows 7 to make use of these new disks or stick to 2TB and less drives on XP.

Please visit the manufacturers website and make sure you understand the issues of connecting such a big drive to your PC before purchasing it.

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