Some years before 1Tb drive was a myth and today you can afford upto 3TB single hard disk below $200. The reason is advancement in technology and need of high space data storage. It does not matter what data you have, a 3TB hard drive consist of more than enough space for all your need. The most traditional model and high space drive which is widely used in multiple numbers is 500GB. To add up more space you purchase more 500GB drives increasing the number of hardware and power usage. According to my experience related to drive purchase and usage I had found that if you need a stable and secure data backup with less hectic then you must opt to go for latest 500 GB drives. Even 1TB works. But there is a risk. Suppose you have 2x500GB hard drive configured on a system under a RAID setup. So here you have two copies of your data stored on different places. In case of failure you have a backup ready. But in 1TB you will need to afford 2x1TB drive which is not support by many regular systems.
Due to lack of compatibility and hardware support 2TB and 3TB goes to the non consideration part of choice. But still I am providing some of the most essential tips that can help you to advance your business by choosing a larger amount of storage space. If you want a NAS then you can blindly go for a 3TB or 2TB drive. Because the disk are managed by a third party device with its own operating system. NAS just provide you an additional support for data storage. There ample of issues faced by users when they connect a 3TB drive in their existing system. First due to bios limit you cannot see the full space. Second sometime you can see half the amount of space missing. Third low speed or data transfer rate. Also various issue related to failed backup or loss of drive partition. Why does this all occur?. This is not a hardware but. You have to properly configure the drive before putting that in your system. Some of the BIOS do not support 3TB space. There are certain methods that can be used to overcome this. As hard drive capacity keeps on growing as the time passes there are also new issue appears.
You might be not happy to use them on your older system. So the challenger here is to use this drives on your existing system without getting low space or other errors. I had also listed some of the top 3TB hard drive below with specification. But before going to the final part it is essential to understand the common issue that involves with this drives. I think the best alternative for those who are on really older system is to go with 3TB drive. But if you are going to buy a new one then there is no need to go in much detail. 3TB drive not only offers you a very large space to store your data, but also ample relief for regular backup programs. You do not live under a fear of low space. But one thing also arises. What if the drive fails. There will be a loss of 3TB of data which is costless. At such point it becomes essential to understand the working and technical specs of drives.
Many a time older pc will give you hard time to configure a 3TB drive on it. So it is better recommended that if you own a older system that is not much a 6month to year old, do not go for 3TB setup or confirm first properly that your motherboard is going to support it. You can do that by checking the manufacturer’s site for compatibility report. The reason behind the issues lies in the bios. Old bios follow an older formula for legacy addressing which is not able calculate the full 3TB size. So many a times user notice a lower space on this disk. Usually 3TB drives are best recommended for 64Bit operating system. The reason is better system architecture that can handle the high data operation. There is no issue of using 3TB drives on Mac systems. At start you can initially check in the bios whether the drive is listed as 3TB or lower. You can use third party partitioning software like GPT tools which and provide a different partitioning scheme than MBR to list the entire space of drives. And if you are trying to work hard on NTFS then you must give up. NTFS is not capable of giving out the entire sectors. Currently best drives in this range are provided by Hitachi, Seagate and Western digital.
This is the companies you can trust. Right now the hard drive provided by them is some of the best performers in the market. You must remember that as you keep on adding content in your drive it becomes slower. It is much easier for a drive to read few GB's of data but if there is a full 3TB drive then the performance becomes super slow. To avoid such stuff the drive and operating system offers you index feature. Higher size drives come with higher efficiency in reading and writing data. What really matters here is the right partitioning. You can tool third party software like one I mentioned above to create GPT partitions. Hitachi gives you a tool called as Paragon software. To use an entire drive capacity you will need to optimize it properly. So this surely removes the options of installing operating system in it. Right now there are certain 3TB hard drive models under Hitachi which are available for $150. I am not sure the exact models but seen on web.
Bookmarks