Current platters are 500gb, are HD based on 640 or 750gb platter densitiies shipping?

This one (800GB) uses 2x500GB platters:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=778

This (640GB) could also be using 2x500GB platters:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=779

There are rumors of 3TB drives in the pipeline. Presumably those would be 4 x 750GB platters.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18865 discusses the Constellation ES (Enterprise grade hard drives) at 3TB this year.

Personally I'd avoid the 3TB drives and look for the 2.25 TB drive at 3 x 750GB. With any luck they'd do some rounding and just call it 2.2TB or even 3x 700GB at 2.1TB. I mean it's bean years since I last formatted a drive anywhere near its advertised capacity so why bother inflating the numbers?

I'm not sure if I know of any currently shipping drives above 2TB but if you can find one that'll be your candidate for >500GB platters.

Since Bios and XP are limited to 2Tb I would be satisfied with that, 4 500gb platters seems a lot though.

I know that 2tb unformatted is around 1.8 formatted. Would XP/bios be able to format a 2.5tb as 2tb?

I'd prefer 2-1tb platter or even 1-2tb platter

500gb platter seems long in tooth.

I don't think there is a BIOS size limit that applies in this thread.

NTFS will let you use volume sizes way larger than 2TB they just can't be the boot volume.

The boot partition is limited to 2TB or less but you shouldn't be booting from a 2TB drive anyway. Better to have a single platter drive or an SSD as your boot drive and have the large drive as the data drive.

I personally avoid 4 platter and 5 platter drives so at 500GB I'd be looking at 1.5TB or less, it'd take >700GB platters to get me to the 2TB partition size in a single drive or in a RAID 1 array.

500GB platters are just now becoming common in lower capacity drives. I sure wouldn't call them long in the tooth. I'm glad they are finally replacing the 320GB platters and 250GB platters that used to be so common.

Consider from the reliability standpoint you are better off using the drives that were common at least 6 months ago than you are buying the drive that comes out next month. They don't call it the cutting edge or bleeding edge because it's safe to buy new products.

I had 6x 500gb (5x 465gb, 2,500,xxx,xxx bytes usable) drives in raid 5 once and with winxp I had a partition of 2.2 or so billion bytes and another one of about 300 million. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me as I don't have that array anymore, but it was something around 2.2 billion bytes.

What is the exact limit in bytes of the 2TB limit? Edit - is it 2,199,023,256 bytes?

3x 750gb platters would be 2,250,xxx,xxx bytes so there isn't much lost there at all and this might be the common way to a larger than 2TB hard drive?

My current setup if drive c gets virally infected then I boot off of D and reimage a new one.

So having bootable is desirable

good question. is it 2tb bootable unformatted or formatted?

are 750gb platters out?

The drive could be 400TB and if the boot partition is 2TB or less it will still be bootable.

If your imaging software lets you control which partition you copy from drive to drive or which partition to put in the image you could make the boot partition 50GB or 2TB either way and still be able to copy it to/from any size drive that can hold the actual data.

beware that Acronis and other home user oriented programs will not give you such fine control so having multiple partitions can be a problem when trying to copy a boot partition to/from a drive that has a data partition.

The largest platter is still 500gb. I think the next step will be 640gb platters and we will see a return to popularity of the 640gb drives as they will be priced similar to 500gb's at the moment and will be faster.

What I'm unsure about is the next capacity up from that. 2x 640gb platters is 1.28TB, maybe drive manufacturers will round this down to 1.25TB or push for 650gb platters to make 1.3TB drives.

3x 640gb platters also results in a strange number, 1.92TB.