Endless Paradigm

According to the latest reports, Seagate could be readying a 3 TB hard drive for release later this year. Problem is – most systems can’t handle the upped storage thanks to ancient 30-year old BIOS restrictions that is limited to 2.1 TB hard drives. Anything over 2.1 TB and your system will read less than the full capacity of the drive, with Seagate’s tests showing that as little as 990 MB of a 3 TB drive is visible in XP. There is a solution to this logical block addressing (LBA) standard:

Quote:    Craig [a Seagate rep] explains that “wee need to extend that to Long LBA addressing,” in order to get around this. Long LBA basically increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address in the command descriptor block, but it also requires a supporting OS.

    According to Seagate, this includes the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista, as well as modified versions of Linux, but it doesn’t include Windows XP. Not only that, but you may not even be able to see 2.1TB of a 3TB drive when using Windows XP.

It looks like if you’re wanting a 3 TB drive in your system you’ll need to do a major overhaul. Maybe this will force some more users onto 64-bit with better systems


source: The PC Report

Didn't wee have this problem back when 8gb drives came out? I'm sure they'll find a workaround. Linux should be unaffected because Linux just uses the BIOS has a reference, and prefers to talk to the hardware itself.

At least in my experience, since linux would run a 20gb drive fine in an old machine that Windows couldn't access over 8gb.

:/ not like I'll have the money to buy one anyway

I have 600GB on my computer and Im already half way thru filling it with gamez and hentai...
Iwould feel better if i had alot of memory

3TB?

Excellent.

very, i have one of their 1TB models, very good brand.

The more the better ;o

3TB...think of all the possibilities

BLARGH

I has 22gb left on my lappy, getting 1TB soon though

1.6 gigs in hard drives. I think I'll be good for a while... :o