What's the largest 2.5' HDD that is available?

What's the largest 2.5' HDD available on the market that would fit in my Alienware 18?
Is there a 4TB 2.5' HDD yet? I would love to get rid of my external USB 4TB HDD and place everything locally on the laptop

 

Looks like 1TB or 2TB is the largest available.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000953331

 

how sad, will the advancement in technology, we are stuck at this capacity for ages

 

The Seagate M9T 2TB is the largest available right now.
You can always Raid 0, 2 of them to get your 4TB and Mr Fox and I have done.

 

Yeah I guess that's the only option for now, to buy 2 of em, RAID them, and install the OS on my 1TB mSATA 840 EVO

 

I know that seagate do a portable 4TB drive but I think it's just 2 2TB drives in a single casing.

All the research is going into SSDs rather than magnetic storage these days.

 

Yes the 4TB seagate drive is just two 2tb drives.

2TB is the highest available at the moment. You could put three in your 18 and still have a 1tb msata ssd for a total of 7tb of space, which is a lot. We are starting to see 6tb and soon 8tb drives for desktops, so I'm sure we'll at least see a 3tb or 4tb drive for laptops.

A 2tb standard 2.5" ssd would also be great.

If you need more storage than that, you can also buy a external 3.5" desktop usb drive. Although up to 7tb isn't bad in the 18.

 

Oh I would loveee a solid 8TB of storage in this laptop haha. But I'd rather go for less and have them all be SSDs.

 

But how goes a msata for booting windows 8.1 in a M18X-R2? Its is only sata2 speeds on R2...Is it worth mounting a setup with 1 Msata(sata 2) + 3x 2TB HD or 1TB SSD(sata 3) + 2x 2TB HD ?

 

I believe it's sata2 (3gbps) but if you really need storage, a 1tb msata ssd + 3 x 2tb hdds will be the best setup for speed and capacity. No one will see the difference between sata2 ssds and sata3 ssds in everyday tasks. So you will still have a fast responsive system, while having a ton of storage space.

 

Yeah, SATA-3 speeds are largely overrated except with HDD and SSD benchmarks. An SSD on SATA-2 or a HDD with a cache acceleration setup will feel and run plenty fast. You won't notice or measure a difference in performance with the vast majority of tasks or tests. For gamers and benchers, this is a big to do about nothing. For people that do a ton of large file transfers, it can matter a whole lot more. If you're a gamer or bencher, don't burn any calories fretting over this stuff. It's a waste of energy, much like getting overly excited about 2133 versus 1866 RAM. You can measure it in testing, but you'll never feel the difference.

 

Unless you have very data intensive apps (say the loading screens in Dragon Age Inquisition ) - as Mr. Fox said - it won't make too much of a difference. I've tried 2x RAID0, 3x RAID0 and 4x (3x2.5+msata) RAID0 (all 256gb SSDs samsung 840 Pros) and moving from 1 to 2x (single to 2 drives in raid0) was the most noticeable improvement. From 2x to 3x was another noticeable improvement though not as much as 1x to 2x and from 3x to 4x was really not noticeable at all (though numbers did go up in benchmarks). The important thing to note from18xR1s (and maybe R2s if they have the same mix n' match drive controllers setup?) though is that it will flood and cap out SATAII connection if you plan on spanning a fast RAID setup over both SATAII and SATAIII (some drives on this and some on that).

I never tested above 2x drives in my M18xR1 but just happen to have a bunch of drives laying around while my M18 was apart. I also tested with my 2x 1tb Samsung 840 EVOs (about the same performance) but didn't keep it, since I needed to put them back into my desktop rig.