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Post Info TOPIC: Seagate to announce 3TB drive later this year
barney


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Seagate to announce 3TB drive later this year
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Thinq has confirmed after speaking to Seagate's senior product manager Barbara Craig a 3TB hard drive will be announced later in the year. There are however a number of major issues beyond raising the areal density to allow users to get a 3TB drive running with full functionality.

One issue is many modern PCs are unable to run hard drives of this size because the original logical block addressing standard (LBA) cannot assign addresses to capacities larger than 2.1TB. The LBA standard was defined by Microsoft and IBM as part of the original DOS standard and it assigns an address to each 512-byte sector, the smallest physical block of data on a hard drive.

Seagate says Long LBA, which increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address in the command descriptor block is the solution to getting around this problem. Craig believes the LBA issue was never seen as a problem until recent years. "Nobody expected back in 1980 when they set the standard that we'd ever address over 2.1TB."

The Long LBA standard however also requires supporting operating systems which include 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista along with modified versions of Linux. Windows XP is not supported and Seagate warns users may not even be able to see 2.1TB of a 3TB drive. The company's tests have revealed in at least one case only 990MB of a 3TB drive was available to users running Windows XP.

"There's also a GUID partition table (GPT) that needs to be implemented for the master boot record." Craig explains this is necessary because master boot record partitions are currently restricted to 2.1TB as well and a new GPT partition table would be necessary to extend past this.

Users hoping to have the 3TB as a secondary disk will not find this to be a problem however further issues remain for those who want to boot their OS off a drive of this size.

Seagate to announce 3TB drive later this year

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