back to article Toshiba tosses out uber-slim THREE TERABYTE HDD

Toshiba has launched a 3TB small-form-factor hard drive, which must set some sort of record, surely. Its MQ03ABB300 – what sexy names these suckers have – is a 2.5-inch disk drive with four platters each holding 750GB. That makes the drive 15mm thick (high in HDD parlance) and suitable for external drive use. Tosh's latest …

  1. werdsmith Silver badge

    I'm going to get two of these, make a RAID 0 pair out of them, copy all my important data on to my wonder 6TB stripe set and then delete it from all other locations so I have only one copy on my super slim storage miracle.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Ermmm.... you'd run of storage space ?

    2. DNTP

      Where you will go wrong is accidentally convincing the stupid that this is a good backup idea, then having to take a vacation day to drive to Rhode Island to hand-carry someone elses' broken drive to a data recovery service.

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Rhode Island only means two things to me, chickens and Family Guy.

        Not sure either of those are any good at platter resuscitation.

  2. D@v3

    bet these ain't gonna be cheap

  3. Riku

    Speaking of sexy names

    Seagate ought to spit out a new Bigfoot-branded range. Say a 3.5" drive with lots of high-density platters spinning at something like 3.6 - 4.2k rpm. That'd be OK for the home NAS and nice and reliable.

    1. Swarthy

      Re: Speaking of sexy names

      Didn't the Bigfoot brand cover 5.25 inch drives? The Fireball was the 3.5" line. I guess they could go back and have Bigfoot as 3.5", and Fireball as 2.5" drives.... but it would be a pale imitation, and feel like it was trading on nostalgia - poorly.

      If Seagate did roll out a proper Bigfoot 5.25" SATA drive with the same (average) areal density as these little nippers, that would be trading on nostalgia, and doing it right.

      1. Down not across

        Re: Speaking of sexy names

        Didn't the Bigfoot brand cover 5.25 inch drives? The Fireball was the 3.5" line. I guess they could go back and have Bigfoot as 3.5", and Fireball as 2.5" drives.... but it would be a pale imitation, and feel like it was trading on nostalgia - poorly.

        Yes. Fireball being bit odd with AT being 7200rpm and TM 5400rpm. Then they had the nice fast (10k/15k) Atlas SCSI drives. IIRC they were designed by the storage division Quantum bought from DEC.

        If Seagate did roll out a proper Bigfoot 5.25" SATA drive with the same (average) areal density as these little nippers, that would be trading on nostalgia, and doing it right.

        Nah. To do the nostalgia right (especially taking into account we're talking about Seagate now), they'd have to do a 5.25 full-height monstrosity (ie like the old ST4096 MFM drive (that some of us ran with RLL controllers to get some extra capacity out of it ...at the expense of reliability ( that to be fair was not great to begin with)).

        Current tech would get a lot more than 80MB out of the 9 head design...

  4. theOtherJT Silver badge

    I assume they're thinking 2U rack mount boxes in server rooms with these, because most laptops I've seen in the last few years won't take 15mm drives, they're too tall for the backing plate to go back on afterwards.

    1. Fuzz

      These are probably aimed at external drives. SATA drives in racks are usually 3.5" and designed for 24x7 running.

      It's worth pointing out that the 2TB Seagate/Samsung drive mentioned is a 9.5mm drive so will fit in laptops.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "SATA drives in racks are usually 3.5" and designed for 24x7 running."

        You haven't looked at server chassis for a while, have you?

  5. fnj

    Unimpressed

    600,000 hours is a pretty piss poor MTBF. HGST 3.5" 3TB Desktar NAS is 1,000,000, and 7K4000 Ultrastar is 2,000,000.

    I'll pass.

    1. bill 27

      Re: Unimpressed

      Uhhh..I realize that it's MTBF, but that's approaching 10 years. In 10 years they might have bigger/faster storage available.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Unimpressed

      You must be the last person left who believes the method they use to measure MTBF has any sort of real world meaning. Read the data from Google, Backblaze and others about what REAL WORLD average failure rates are (around 2%, equating to a 50 month MTBF) assuming you don't get hit with one of the bad lots where MTBF is in single digit months.

      A 2 million hour MTBF is worth about a much as the millions you're hoping to get from that 419 prince.

      1. bill 27
        Pint

        Re: Unimpressed

        "REAL WORLD average failure rates"

        A concept also used by auto battery companies and probably others. They sell you a battery with a 108 month, or some big number, warranty for a big chunk of change. However, they're betting you'll sell/trade the auto in 3-4 years, rendering the warranty on the battery worth less than spit.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Unimpressed

          Maybe so, but if you read the fine print the warranty on car batteries are usually pro-rated after 36 months. So if it fails prematurely you get a discount on the same brand.

  6. danwat1234

    Typo in article, it's Samsung M9T not MT9.

    So, Samsung's M9T 2TB laptop drive is only 9.5mm thick, which is the standard thickness for laptop drives. But has 3 platters. So why didn't Toshiba make their 3TB laptop drive be 12.5mm thick? that should be enough for 4 platters, since, the industry has shifted 1 platter laptop drives from 7mm thick to 5mm thick. 2 platter drives from 9.5mm thick to 7mm thick, and 3 platter drive from being 12.5mm thick to now 9.5mm thick (like the Samsung M9T).

    Also, Seagate must be using 5 platters to get 4TB in a 2.5" drive, yet their drive is 15mm thick too, indicating further that Toshiba could have put it in the 12.5mm form factor, so it could be used in some laptops, like the Asus G50VT and others and also the optical bay of laptops with the hard drive caddy.

    The 2TB M9T is slightly less than $100 to buy, might as well get that.

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