big disk drives: a threshold

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I need to buy a new big disk drive.  Slow is OK.

2T "green" drives seem to be a sweet spot.

WD 2T is $70 this weekend
<http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=15_210_212&item_id=027811>

Other brands are a little more expensive or have shorter warranties
(Seagate).

Samsung and Hitachi have the advantage over WD and Seagate that (I
think) they let you set a bound on error recovery time, something you
need to do if you are going to sensibly RAID the drives.  Soon Samsung
and Hitachi will disappear from the disk drive market (their disk drive
divisions have been bought by WD and Seagate -- scary).

WD 3T green is $120 this weekend
<http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=15_210_212&item_id=039030>
Tempting, even though the price per byte is a bit higher.

I don't think I can use the 3T drive.  I hope I'm wrong.  So I'll lay
out my reasoning:

- the WD30EZRX drive has 4K byte sectors.  I don't think that it
  pretends to have 512 byte (earlier models did)

- I don't think that older BIOSes (perhaps most without UEFI booting)
  understand booting from 4K sectors.  Do new BIOSes get this right?

- as far as I know, none of my computers has a BIOS that knows about
  UEFI.

Other issues:

- to use more than 2T, you need to use GPT partitioning OR larger than
  512 byte sectors.

- using GPT isn't a problem because it can be made to look enough like
  an old fashioned partition table to get a BIOS to boot from it.
  Once booted, Linux can handle GPT (and 4k sectors).
  But it does take care.

- using larger than 512 byte sectors just to use the old fashioned
  partition table probably isn't useful because so many old things
  break with larger sectors anyway.

Have I missed something?
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