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