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Seagate confirms 3TB drive for late 2010

by on18 May 2010


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Too big for XP and too cool to boot


Seagate
has officially confirmed that it will introduce a 3TB drive later this year. In a chat with Thinq, Seagate's Senior Product Manager Barbara Craig confirmed the plans and noted that getting to 3TB is not as easy as it seems.

Due to logical block addressing (LBA) limitations inherited from DOS, it is impossible to increase storage size beyond 2.1TB without introducing a new LBA standard. Seagate did just that, by extending LBA to Long LBA addressing and increasing the number of bytes used to define addresses. However, Long LBA is not supported by older operating systems, such as Windows XP. Hence, only Vista and Windows 7 users can hope to use the new drives.

This might not sound like a major issue, as most users have already migrated to more recent operating systems, but booting from the new drives is also troublesome. Most current motherboards can't cope with Long LBA due to BIOS and controller limitations. Despite this, Craig is optimistic and believes the industry will embrace the new standard by year's end.

More here.
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