Seagate's huge new 3TB drive won't work on your PC

By Richi Jennings. May 18, 2010.

Seagate's confirmed that it's about to launch a 3TB hard drive. Wow, that's big, but there's a catch: practically no PCs will be able to use it. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers search for space.

Your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention Jed's Beautiful iPad...
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Ben Hardwidge gets rumor confirmation:

Seagate ... has confirmed ... that “we are announcing a 3TB drive later this year,” but ... the ancient foundations of the PC’s three-decade legacy ... [means] that many of today’s PCs are simply incapable of coping with ... a larger capacity than 2.1TB.
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It’s a limit that until now has seemed so far off in the future. ... Many hard drive controllers, BIOSes, drivers and operating systems ... [have] caps of 2.1TB, and this is going to take ... a massive amount of work.

Sarah Jacobsson adds:

If your 2TB hard drive is feeling a bit cramped ... Seagate feels your pain. ... However, if you're currently running ... 32-bit ... Windows ... you may need to upgrade. ...  [That] would have been an astronomical amount of space ... back in the 80's. 
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The new drive will be part of Seagate's Constellation ES family ... and will feature a 6Gbit/s SAS interface.

Chris Mellor explains:

Disk drives are addressed in 512-byte ... LBAs as set down ... in the 80s. ... You'll need an operating system that supports extended or long LBAs in order to go beyond that point. ... Windows XP does not. ... Seagate and other disk drive manufacturers are working with ... vendors with plug-fest events.
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Western Digital has its Advanced Formatting scheme ... but it talks about having Windows XP support for the 4096 byte data sectors involved. Each ... appears as ... logical 512 byte sectors by the hard disk drive interface.

Matt Blowes adds more bad news:

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. ... Seagate says Long LBA ... is the solution to getting around this problem.
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Further issues remain for those who want to boot their OS off a drive of this size. ... GUID partition table ... is a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) intended to replace ... BIOS. ... [It] allows for enough addresses. ... However ... only a select number of boards actually feature UEFI.

Ray Willington says it's "great news":

It will drive down prices of 2TB and 1TB HDDs, making it cheaper to craft a new RAID box with "old" 2TB drives.
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We could see the first HDD to break the 2TB barrier on sale before 2010 ends. Exciting times, folks.

Meanwhile, Lincoln Tran quips:

Drives getting this roomy are nice, but the bigger they are, the harder they fall. ... I've lost whole 50GB drives. ... It was painful but if I ever lose 3TB of stuff, man, I'll just go berserk, then go in the corner and cry myself to sleep.

And Finally...
Jed's Beautiful iPad  
 
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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email:itbw@richij.com.

You can also read Richi's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.