Seagate plans to release a 3TB hard drive before the end of 2010, but it will only be compatible with 64-bit operating systems, the company confirmed.
The new 3.5-inch Constellation ES drive needs a 64-bit OS since PCs and servers will need to be able to support drives 2.1TB or higher. The 2.1GB cap is an older standard related to an industry-wide decision to reduce the logical block address (LBA) used on HDDs.
The LBA range support is available through Microsoft Windows 7 and 64-bit Windows Vista, but the long address cannot be read by any 32-bit OSes. It's a shame that XP looks like it will miss out on the long LBA addressing, according to sources, since XP will be able to access just one-third of the drive.
The drive will be available in SAS and SATA versions, but there are still significant concerns related to the larger drives.
"If high capacities are in your future, I highly recommend you check with your software and hardware suppliers on their plans for implementing Long LBAs today," noted Barbara Craig, Seagate senior product marketing manager, in a blog post.
In the future, manufacturers will need to pay attention to long-term LBAs. I expect other manufacturers -- including Seagate, which will wait to see how this turns out -- to learn from any issues that arise with this new capacity.
Seagate is marketing this new drive for use by the enterprise, but a consumer option is currently in development. The smaller 2.5-inch drive can be used in notebooks, but the company hasn't said when the drive will be released.
I'm enjoying the new change in the PC industry at the moment now that the Universal Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard has been created by manufacturers.
