3TB Seagate hard drive on the way

Seagate looking to overcome a number of issues before 3TB launch

18 May 2010 15:55 GMT / By Paul Lamkin

The never ending quest for data storage is to enter the next level later on this year when Seagate plans to launch a hard drive with a mammoth 3TB worth of storage on it. That's 3072GB - enough space to store almost 630,000 average MP3s or 1312 copies of Avatar from iTunes.

Trouble is though, that other technologies are having trouble keeping up with the rapid expansion. It's not just about enhancing areal density - there are other issues that come in to play. Motherboard BIOS, RAID vendor support and even good old DOS all have an affect on how big storage can go. Also, the OS system on your PC would have to be compatible with a 3TB drive. At present this would exclude Windows XP.

The reason is because the logical block addressing (LBA) standards that were built into the original version of DOS way back when are not able to assign enough addresses to all the 512-byte sections of a drive. The maximum addresses it can do is 2.1TB's worth.

Still with us? Good, you're doing well. If you're not, you should probably avoid Thinq's exclusive interview with Seagate's Barbara Craig, which goes into details that made our head hurt.

Via: thinq.co.uk

Full tags

Hardware, Hard drives, Seagate