Seagate Confirms 3TB Drive, Potential Problems

Posted Tue, 05/18/2010 - 07:45

Not that it should come as a huge surprise that a major hard drive manufacturer is working on ever-larger storage capacities, but a Seagate senior product manager has confirmed to Thinq that the company is planning to unveil a 3TB hard disk later this year.

Barbara Craig, the product manager, said that the move to 3TB involves a heck of a lot more work than just upping the areal density this time around. "The root of the problem is the original LBA (logical block addressing) standard, which can't assign addresses to capacities in excess of 2.1TB," the report said—a problem that's been lying in wait since Microsoft and IBM developed the original DOS standard in 1980.

The potential ramifications of this so far appear to be what OSes will be compatible with 3TB drives.

Craig said that Seagate plans to extend the standard to Long LBA addressing, which would work in 64-bit Windows 7 and Vista as well as Linux, but wouldn't work in 32-bit Vista or any version of Windows XP, the report said. In fact, it's possible that XP may not even see the first 2.1TB portion of a larger drive, either. This brings back memories, doesn't it?

Another issue surrounds the GUID partition table (GPT) for the master boot record. Because current MBR partitions are limited in size to 2.1TB, a system would need the new table to see beyond that amount of storage. An updated GPT is part of Intel's proposed Extensible Firmware Interface specification, which would replace the traditional BIOS and is supported by the United EFI Forum (UEFI), but most motherboards don't currently feature the Interface.

Craig estimates, however, that 80 percent of the infrastructure is ready to support the UEFI standard.

A version of this article originally appeared on Gearlog.