1TB hard drives (not an array) queued up for sale at BestBuy.com

[ViRaL1]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8295588&ref=39&loc=01&st=1tb&type=produc...=1172880158065


1TB/32MB/7200RPM

[BJ_M]

System Requirements Intel® Pentium® processor; Windows 2000, XP or Vista; 64MB RAM;

why do they publish such system req. crap ?

[ViRaL1]

Probably to keep people from returning them because they can't get them to work under Win98 or on their 486s.

[tekkieman]

System Requirements Intel® Pentium® processor; Windows 2000, XP or Vista; 64MB RAM;

What a shame...I would have bought a few, but since they obviously won't work in linux....

[Ron B]

On one hand, it would be great to have 1TB of storage in one drive, but on the other hand, if the drive takes a dump, you lose 1TB of data.
How long do you reckon it would take to defrag that baby?

[aedipuss]

god save us. they're hatachi/ibm deathstars. max life maybe a year..... i still haven't forgiven them for all the 45gb dtla models that crapped out early in the 00's and they wouldn't replace.

[edDV]

Comes down to price per GB. Smaller drives cost much less per GB and data exposure is less. 500GB, 750GB and now 1000GB drives carry too much of a price/GB penalty. They should be less/GB.

[redwudz]

Deathstars I have 2TB of Maxtors (Eight of them) in my video server. But I also don't save anything in there that I can't afford to lose. One thing nice about the Maxtors is I don't need a heater in the room.

[SLK001]

Instead, buy 2 Seagate 500GB drives (either SATA or ULTRA ATA) for $360 and save about $40. As a bonus, you get a better drive and a longer warranty.

[aedipuss]

seagate 500gbs ide and sata are going for 120$us with free shipping from frys.com they do still come with a 5 year warranty. i only use seagates and w.d.'s.

[edDV]

400-500GB is becoming the sweet spot for price. Last year it was 160-300GB.

[AlecWest]

I guess I must belong to the Flat Earth Society, hehehe. Whenever I've gone out to buy a hard drive, I always end up asking, "What's the smallest one you sell?" I'm not a "gamer" and only have specific apps I use.

Currently, I have 2 hard drives in my desktop. Both are 40gig Western Digitals. The first hard drive is partitioned right down the middle - 20gigs allotted to Win98SE, 20gigs allotted to WinXP Home. The other 40gig HD is formatted NTFS and is reserved for video capture and editing. And though I've yet to run out of space I needed, the new desktop I buy later this year will probably have bigger hard drives ... not because I need them but because 80gigs is about as small as you can buy (unless you go to online sellers selling discontinued equipment). My new setup will probably have 2 hard drives, both 80gigs (if I can still get them). Hard drive #1 will be partitioned 3 ways - Win98SE on one partition, WinXP Home on a 2nd partition, and Ubuntu on a third partition. And as currently, the second 80gig HD will be formatted NTFS and reserved for video capture and editing.

P.S. I had a question somewhat related to something said earlier. I've heard that, for Win98SE, 512MB RAM is the upper limit. But, does that mean Win98SE won't work on a system with more RAM ... or that Win98SE will merely not recognize RAM above 512MB?

[TBoneit]

In general win98 gets flakey with more than 512Mb. As I remeber it something to do with the memory addresses being the same as addresses used for I/O and such.A Google search will find workarounds that sometimes work and sometimes do not.

to Quote"

"Out of Memory" Error Messages with Large Amounts of RAM Installed (Q253912)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The information in this article applies to:


Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows 95
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SYMPTOMS
If a computer that is running any of the versions of Windows that are listed above contains more than 512 megabytes (for example, 768 megabytes) of physical memory (RAM), you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

You may be unable to open an MS-DOS session (or command prompt) while Windows is running. Attempts to do so may generate the following error message:

There is not enough memory available to run this program.
Quit one or more programs, and then try again.
The computer may stop responding (hang) while Windows is starting, or halt and display the following error message:

Insufficient memory to initialize windows. Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files, and restart your computer.


CAUSE
The Windows 32-bit protected-mode cache driver (Vcache) determines the maximum cache size based on the amount of RAM that is present when Windows starts. Vcache then reserves enough memory addresses to permit it to access a cache of the maximum size so that it can increase the cache to that size if needed. These addresses are allocated in a range of virtual addresses from 0xC0000000 through 0xFFFFFFFF (3 to 4 gigabytes) known as the system arena.

On computers with large amounts of RAM, the maximum cache size can be large enough that Vcache consumes all of the addresses in the system arena, leaving no virtual memory addresses available for other functions such as opening an MS-DOS prompt (creating a new virtual machine).


WORKAROUND
To work around this problem, use one of the following methods:

Use the MaxFileCache setting in the System.ini file to reduce the maximum amount of memory that Vcache uses to 512 megabytes (524,288 KB) or less.

For additional information about how to use the MaxFileCache setting, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q108079 32-Bit File Access Maximum Cache Size
Use the System Configuration utility to limit the amount of memory that Windows uses to 512 megabytes (MB) or less.

For additional information about how to use the System Configuration utility, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q181966 System Configuration Utility Advanced Troubleshooting Settings
Reduce the amount of memory that is installed in your computer to 512 MB or less.


STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION
Vcache is limited internally to a maximum cache size of 800 MB.

This problem may occur more readily with Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) video adapters because the AGP aperture is also mapped to addresses in the system arena. For example, if Vcache is using a maximum cache size of 800 MB and an AGP video adapter has a 128-MB aperture mapped, there is very little address space remaining for the other system code and data that must occupy this range of virtual addresses.


Cheers

[rallynavvie]

I guess I must belong to the Flat Earth Society, hehehe. Whenever I've gone out to buy a hard drive, I always end up asking, "What's the smallest one you sell?" I'm not a "gamer" and only have specific apps I use.

That's not the best approach anymore, you should simply ask what the cheapest drive they sell is. I had to replace a 40GB HDD in one of the company computers (the image/bundle used for that computer required a 40GB boot drive) and it cost $80 at CompUSA whereas they also had 120GB drives going for the exact same price. If you weren't required to use a specific size of drive the extra space isn't going to hurt.

I have to agree with Ron B about risking 1TB of data. We're already close, if not above, the need for any larger capacities. I mean video files are some of the largest files you can have and unless you require more than the existing 500GB drives for a single file it would be better just keeping some split up for security reasons. And if such a video file, such as an HD feed, did exist it would suck trying to scrub through that file in something like Premiere. At that point you'd need to be using nested RAID and thus would use smaller drives anyway.

Those 1TB drives are aimed at leet-kiddie gamers that always feel the need to buy this first-round expensive garbage just to brag up their system. I'm going to laugh hard the first I hear of some tool who corrupts the stripe on a pair of those in a single 2TB volume

[handyguy]

I think they are cheaper at buy.com about $299AR.

[AlecWest]

WORKAROUND
To work around this problem, use one of the following methods:

Use the MaxFileCache setting in the System.ini file to reduce the maximum amount of memory that Vcache uses to 512 megabytes (524,288 KB) or less.

That's an easy fix (grin). Thanks for mentioning it. My current desktop only has 256MB RAM, so there's no issue. And currently, my Vcache section exists but has no value assigned to it (probably normal). But after I install it on my new system (will have 2GB RAM), I'll probably need to access the partition with a Win98 boot disk ... and edit the SYSTEM.INI file:

From this:

[VCACHE]

to this:

[VCACHE]
MaxFileCache=524288

That way, I'd be assured of not encountering the error "in" Win98SE. Thanks, I like easy solutions.

[stiltman]

Soon as our vendor says they are supported, we'll be upgrading to them. BTW we have 5 x 300 connected to a 3ware card

[ViRaL1]

I guess I must belong to the Flat Earth Society, hehehe. Whenever I've gone out to buy a hard drive, I always end up asking, "What's the smallest one you sell?" I'm not a "gamer" and only have specific apps I use.

I'm on the other end of the spectrum. I'm hoping to colocate Google. :P

[SLK001]

Currently, I have 2 hard drives in my desktop. Both are 40gig Western Digitals.

Only 80GBs of storage? Hell, I have files bigger that that!

[MOVIEGEEK]

All I buy are Seagate 120GB,they are the perfect size for updating older PC's/OS that do not support 48lba and I can get them online or on sale for $70.
I don't expect small(<160GB) HD's to be around for long because the demand for large HD's is growing.

[ViRaL1]

$70? OUCH!!! The last batch of Seagates I bought (4 of them from BestBuy.com) I paid $40 each, and that was around a year ago. Granted, they were on sale, but still.