Seagate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive

The computer storage giant Seagate has released more details about their new 3TB hard drive and its release later this year. The problem that Seagate was able to overcome was the logical block addressing standard, which is unable to give addresses to any storage block greater than 2.1TB. The first edition of LBA standards gave an address to each 512-byte sector, the smallest physical block of data on a drive. The solution was moving to Long LBA addressing, which increases the number of bytes used for an LBA address. Seagate says that this update will be usable in the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista, and some versions of Linux, but it isn’t available for Windows XP. It has been speculated that Windows XP couldn’t recognize 2.1TB of a 3TB drive. To make this even more difficult, for those two operating systems to boot to a GPT partition on the drive, the motherboard must have Unified Extensible Firmware Interface suppport rather than BIOS-based booting. It will be very interesting to follow how other drive makers overcome this problem as hard drives start to move past the 2TB limit.