Seagate is launching a new hard drive later this year with a huge capacity of 3TB. The new 3TB drive won’t function on all computers though due to it’s sheer size.
Back in the 80’s the standard set for hard drives restricted them to 2.1 TB (a limit they might have thought couldn’t be achieved on a single drive). Due to this restriction the only way the drive will work is when using a 64-bit operating system. In particular, Windows XP will not work and you’ll need to choose a 64-bit variant of either Windows Vista or Windows 7. Also, some modified versions of Linus will be capable of running this drive.
No formal announcement has been made about the drive, but we expect that we will hear something later this year prior to the release of the mammoth drive.
One interesting thing to note is that if using the drive on XP that roughly 1/3 of the storage capacity will be usable due to the way it formats. The shorter LBA addressing means it fills up rather quickly with details on how to read data from the drive.
Via: Gizmodo
3TB isn’t that big. I’ll fill it no problem what so ever. I’ll have to buy two.