3TB Hard Drives Coming, but You’ll need a new Computer

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has confirmed to UK website Thinq that 3TB hard drives are definitely on the plan for 2010.

The only problem? If you’re using a 32-bit version of a Windows operating system (which is – most people), you may end up seeing as little as 990MB of that huge storage capacity because of limitations to the Logical Block Addressing (LBA) measures used to access the space. Current PC standard for LBA cannot address more than 2.1TB of storage in a single drive.

The limitation appears set to become the "Y2K problem" for hard drives with the limitation of the LBA system setup by Microsoft and IBM back in 1980. Apparently, no-one expected anyone to need more than 2.1TB of storage.

Seagate product manager Barbara Craig told Thinq support for Long LBA is required for both hardware and software to handle the new drives which limits operating system support to 64-bit Windows 7 and Vista plus modified versions of Linux. The new 3TB drive won’t work with Windows XP at all.

The problem with hardware is more difficult to fix.

Drives of greater than 2.1TB will also require a GUID Partition Table – a system implemented in Apple computers – because the old Master Boot Record (MBR) method of noting storage particulars again can’t work with drives greater than 2.1TB. Intel announced last year that it was looking to improve the old DOS-look BIOS system with EFI – Extensible Firmware Interface.

However, very few PC motherboards currently support EFI and that pretty much knocks things on the head right there in terms of upgrading.

So if you’re thinking about turning your PC into a storage farm, chances are you’re going to need to start from scratch with a new PC to go with it.

Source: Techlogg.com