The 3 TB hard drives are here; let’s send them all back to Malaysia

by philg

After getting some good advice here from readers on building the ultimate video editing desktop machine, I ordered an HP-490t, the top-of-the-line HP home computer, complete with 16 GB of RAM and a 160 GB solid-state boot drive underneath its six CPU cores. I did not order any hard drives from HP because I knew that it wouldn’t be long before 3 TB internal drives would be available. Imagine my delight when I found that Newegg had the latest 3 TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive in stock. Surely a brand new motherboard with a brand new build of Windows 7 would be able to talk to this new hard drive.

The $240 disk drive arrived without a cable and without screws, in order to give the consumer a chance to run some extra errands. Once screws and cable were attached, however, both the BIOS and Windows recognized the drive only as 800 GB in size. Some online reviews indicate that the product doesn’t work with Windows 7 unless you plug in an extra RAID card, which they provide (still no cable). At the cost of clogging up the last slot in the HP desktop therefore, the disk should in theory work. Except that the little RAID card that Western Digital provides is physically incompatible with slotting into a standard size case. The WD phone tech support guy said that the disk should work fine. He said “maybe it is something that was done to the BIOS when set up for the solid state disk” but could not explain where to look for a custom BIOS setting (I asked “is there a ‘recognize new hard drives as some other size than what they are’ setting in a typical BIOS?”).

So the drive goes back to newegg.com now… I’d be interested to hear from readers who’ve had success with a 3 TB drive.

[I should add that the machine has proven its worth for video editing. Those 6 CPU cores can convert high-def video to H.264 (MPEG-4 compression) in less than half of real-time, e.g., it takes about 30 seconds to export a 1-minute video. Photoshop and Premiere are responsive even though the source files are being pulled from a network-attached storage server (HP Mediasmart, as it happens, so this is an all HP show).

I should also note that Windows Live Movie Maker, a free Microsoft application, works great on this machine with the AVCHD files from the Sony camcorder. I can trim and assemble clips, add titles, and export compressed versions to .wmv. As the application is intended not to require any technical knowledge (unlike Premiere, which seems to assume that every user was a member of the Motion Picture Experts Group MPEG-4 AVC committee), it is hard to know what compression standards it is using. I picked “Zune HD”, which is 720p output, but I’m worried that it is some sort of Microsoft codec that will become unreadable when the company finally succumbs to Google’s Chrome OS.]

17 thoughts on “The 3 TB hard drives are here; let’s send them all back to Malaysia”

  1. This is a really good advertisement for Apple. I believe the way I added a drive to my iMac was to plug in a USB2 cable and start using the drive, which showed up with the full capacity right away.

    I know several professional editors here in Hollywood and several more amateurs. Everyone of them uses an Apple set up.

  2. Your frustration is completely understandable – but how is it that your high-end PC has only one empty slot?

  4. Many hard drive buyers are swapping out an old drive or already have a cable for some other reason. There’s no reason why every hard drive should come with a cable, adding to the cost of the drive, or why you should expect it.

    But Newegg should suggest buying one, if they don’t.

  5. Colin: I don’t think that any Windows machines have trouble with 3 TB hard drives attached via USB. That’s why Western Digital initially shipped these drives only in an external box with a USB interface. So what you did with your iMac would have worked fine on this HP desktop computer if I’d wanted to live with a hard drive in an external box and suffer with perhaps a bit of slowness from the interface.

    TimB: How did the high-end PC have only one empty slot? I considered the monster Dell XPS box but it wouldn’t fit under my desk. The HP is a medium-sized case. It looks like they’ve wasted an entire slot on a small WiFi card. Why that isn’t on the motherboard I don’t know.

    Andreas: This PC did cost somewhat less than the equivalent Mac… about $3500 less, actually, than an Apple with a similar amount of CPU and RAM. Perhaps this latest generation hard drive would have worked fine in a Macintosh, but there are a lot of applications that I use (and need to generate income) on this Windows 7 machine that don’t run on the Mac. So I guess I could save some time by using a Mac, but mostly because I wouldn’t be able to get any paying work done.

    sr: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136764 is the page on Newegg. They suggest some things to buy with the drive, but not screws or cable.

  6. Seems you have hit the 2TB barrier, Phil.

    “however legacy Master boot record structures only support disk partitions up to 2 TiB in size, while the newer GUID Partition Table and Extensible Firmware Interface do not feature any practical limit on disk or partition size.” (Wikipedia on “Logical block addressing”)

    The german version of “Tom’s Hardware” denotes the following points to make it work with Win 7:

    Partitioning with GPT, instead of MBR, to make the disk usable.

    UEFI-System instead of BIOS-based, to make it bootable. That’s why the RAID-adapter came into play, seems it got one.

    Further info, explaining GPT and UEFI, on Wikipedia.

  7. Reinhard: I didn’t want or try to boot from this drive, so I’m not sure why I would have needed a UEFI system. As to the Windows 7 idea… How could I have partitioned it with GPT or MBR if the BIOS and operating system both saw it only as an 800 GB drive? I didn’t want partitions in any case.

    [At this point you might be questioning my PC hardware/Windows sysadmin experience. In fact, I try not to do more with desktop machines/Windows than necessary (my servers are all Unix, except for the home Mediasmart thing). During its four years of flawless operation, I never cracked open the case on the Windows XP Dell desktop that this new HP replaces. However, in the Great 3 TB Install Challenge, the heavy lifting was done by a recent graduate of Olin College of Engineering and he is something of a PC/Windows expert. So I don’t think that personal incompetence can explain this debacle.]

  8. Well, I guess you want at a least one. 🙂

    But there seems to be no way of accessing such a big partition without GPT.

    Sorry, I simply missed the windows part, only noticed the BIOS problem.

    If you don’t want to boot from that disk, you can ignore that UEFI stuff.

    I have never used GPT, my drives are 1TB each. Don’t know if Windows is able to display the proper attributes of such a big disk before a GPT partitioning took place. It should, of course, but hey, this is Microsoft, the company that doesn’t even offer full support for solid state disks, with Vista.

    But this 800GB issue sounds odd. Question is, if Windows is taking that value from the BIOS, or not. I wasn’t able to find info what kind of controller your HP has. Driver by Intel, perhaps? The site I mentioned before states that the 9.6-Version of the Intel “Rapid-Storage-Driver” isn’t capable to properly access those big drives. Soon to be replaced by version 10.1. I’m just citing from a ten days old article, I have no own knowledge here, sorry.

  9. Reinhard: I think the HP motherboard is an all-Intel show. The BIOS showed the disk as 800 GB and Windows as 790 or so. How would you even update the driver you’re mentioning? Update the BIOS? Or would an update to the OS make it work? I really don’t need 3 TB; I just wanted to say that I was first on the block with it!

  10. Nerd. 🙂 But I’m reading you since I stumbled over “Berlin, Nazis and Prague”, in 1995, so this isn’t hot news for me. Hey, the nineties, these were the days when I really knew something about computers.

    When the new drivers are finally available, these should be offered here:

    http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=15251&keyword=%22rapid-storage%22&lang=eng

    I don’t know the installation procedure, but it shouldn’t be hard to get that info from the same site.

    Announced to be released end of November, if “Tom’s” people are right. But I wasn’t able to find any other sources for that.

    One month, without any proof that this will really help? I think you’d better send it back.

  11. OK, I might stupidly point out the obvious here, but back in the day I had a 120 GB drive which would show up as 40 (or 80? I forget..). Anyway, a quick update of the motherboard BIOS solved that problem right away. So, if you haven’t already, it might be worth checking the HP website for an updated BIOS, if they released one.

  12. Thanks, Reinhard. I really am having trouble figuring out how what are supposedly the world’s most sophisticated tech companies let this happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives and a bit of Googling show that the first 2 TB drives were being shipped early in 2009. That’s more than 1.5 years ago. Would have it been tough for HP, Intel, and Microsoft to foresee that a 3 TB drive would be available shortly afterwards? Is 1.5 years not enough time to write a driver or two? One of the things that consumers were supposed to get from the CPU/chipset/OS monopoly was a diversity of choice in the rest of the hardware, e.g., hard drives.

  13. Mihai: Thanks for the suggestion. I did check the HP support site and they don’t offer any BIOS updates. They do post a cautionary note not to apply BIOS updates from anyone other than HP.

  16. Congratulations on taking the arrows for new technology. 🙂

    Personally, I would have gone with two 2TB drives configured as a RAID1 mirror, unless you really need 3TB. 3TB is a lot of data to lose if that single drive fails. How are you doing backups? How big is your NAS?

    Oh, I was working inside an eight year old Micron case last week. I noticed they very nicely provided extra drive rails and screws, enough for three drives. I think the bean counters are optimizing on every penny now, so you wouldn’t find that in a modern PC.

Comments are closed.