Seagate: Industry Not 3TB HDD Capacity-Ready
While confirming that a 3 TB HDD will be announced later this year, Seagate has explained the hurdles the company is facing to make it happen.
While confirming that the company will indeed announce a 3 TB hard drive later this year, Seagate product manager Barbara Craig admitted that moving to a capacity greater than 2.1 TB requires more work than merely upping the areal density. In fact, most PCs just aren't built to cope with hard drive capacities beyond that limit thanks to the original logical block addressing (LBA) standard set by Microsoft and IBM twenty years ago.
We've heard this before song and dance before: the limited LBA was originally designed for DOS, and only allotted 512-byte sectors for each sector, locking capacities to a 2.1 TB limit. According to Craig, at the time no one imagined that technology would allow for capacities over 2.1 TB when the LBA standard was developed in 1980.
With that said, Long LBA addressing will need to be applied to get around the capacity lock, requiring 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and modified versions of Linux. As for Windows XP, Long LBA addressing leaves the older OS out of the picture. Craig said that in-house tests have shown that only 990 MB of a 3 TB drive is available in XP, with the remaining 2.1 TB literally unseen by the OS.
But the current LBA isn't the only hurdle. Craig said that a new GUID partition table (GPT) will need to be released, as current master boot record partitions are locked to 2.1 TB. GPT and Long LBA addressing are now part of the new UEFI system, however this new BIOS replacement hasn't become standard, and is only used in a minimum number of motherboards. As it stands now, a 3 TB drive is pointless until the industry is overhauled, including motherboards, RAID controllers, drivers, and operating systems.
"On the UEFI standard, we’re going to a Plugfest next month to ensure that everybody is ready, and the IDEMA Group is also supporting them," Craig said.
If you still run a 32-bit OS, you are obsolete.
Good point. Anyone else have someone cry when you tell them how much it will cost to get their data recovered?
If you still run a 32-bit OS, you are obsolete.
Back up...
"only 990 MB of a 3 TB drive"
^
Btw, considering raid can make your data safer due to being able to replace 1 drive and recreate the img. would anyone else be a bit scared of putting that much data on one drive?
Would creating a 2TB partition and then a 1TB partition (being 2 primary paritions on a 3TB drive) solve the problem?
I got 2 2TB green hard drives on windows 7, that as far as I know do not
work (or at least are not recognize properly) under windows XP, so then why a more or bigger drive could?
Pretty much anyone running windows 7 with a PC 2 years or "younger" should be able to run/install a 3TB hard drive without a problem.
I just want WD to announce their 5TB hard drives, but we might have to wait a little longer for this.
note: my 2 2TB drives only have 1.81TB available, so my question is,
how much a 3TB would really have available for use?
I'm guessing around 2.6TB of actual space.
Personally I've used Seagate drives since 06 and have yet to have a single failure. Hitachi is actually the only brand drive to ever fail on me, I've got a few working Western Digital and Samsung drives too.
Only problem is you can't boot to GUID Partition Table without EFI, which isn't supported by a lot of hardware.
But a drive that size is probably being used for storage anyways.
One active partition can be 2TB. You can have up to four active partitions, so in theory you could take an 8TB hard drive and partition it into four 2TB sections and everything will work fine on current hardware.