Seagate 3TB Hard Disk Drive Release Date and Details Revealed
Seagate’s Senior Product Manager Barbara Craig confirmed that “We (Seagate) are announcing a 3TB drive later this year.” She however explained that upgrade to the 3-terabyte storage size has given them a lot of headache. The crux of the problem apparently is caused by the old DOS-era standard for LBA OR logical block addressing which can’t assign addresses to capacities in excess of 2.1TB.
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. Microsoft and IBM worked out this standard back in the 1980s when DOS was prevalent. The original LBA standard was only meant to give addresses to each 512-byte sector of hard drives up to 2.1TB size limit. Craig said “Nobody expected back in 1980 when they set the standard that we’d ever address over 2.1TB.”
Official Logo of Seagate Corporation
Craig explains further that “we need to extend that to Long LBA addressing,” in order to circumvent this limitation. Long LBA basically increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address in the command descriptor block. This method however also requires a compatible operating system that supports Long LBA. According to her, this includes the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista, as well as modified versions of Linux. Sadly, it doesn’t include Windows XP or Windows 2000. Not only that, but you may not even be able to see 2.1TB of a 3TB drive when using Windows XP.
Sample Photo of Seagate's New 3TB Hard Disk Drive
Another challenge for Seagate in their attempt to bring a 3TB drive to the market is “There’s also a GUID partition table (GPT) that needs to be implemented,” explains Craig, “for the master boot record.” Current master boot record partitions are limited to 2.1TB, so a new GPT partition table is also required to go beyond this limit.
GPT was originally proposed as a part of Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface [EFI]; a user-friendly setup system designed to replace the archaic ASCII-based BIOS. This specification is now looked after by the United EFI Forum (UEFI). One of the major new features of it allows for longer LBA addressing. Unfortunately, majority of motherboards do not support UEFI yet. Seagate’s mission to bring a 3-terabyte hard disk is therefore going to affect a large portion of the computer industry. Motherboard makers, operating systems and software drivers will be forced to overcome the 2.1 TB limitations imposed by Microsoft and IBM 30 years ago.
Inspite of these hurdles, Seagate is optimistic about the cooperation it can get from partner companies. The company aims to bring a 3TB drive to commercial launch by the end of 2010 or first quarter of 2011. Actual release date of the Seagate 3TB HDD will be posted here when it becomes available in the US, UK, Canada, India, China, and the rest of the world.
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