Technology news website Thinq recently reported that Seagate’s senior product manager Barbara Craig has said that they will be announcing a 3TB hard disk drive (HDD) later this year.<\/p>\n
According to Thinq there are however challenges in launching such a large HDD, including the fact that many PCs are not capable of coping with such a large storage device.<\/p>\n
“The ancient foundations of the PC’s three-decade legacy has once again reared its DOS-era head, revealing that many of today’s PCs are simply incapable of coping with hard drives that have a larger capacity than 2.1TB,” Thinq reports.<\/p>\n
“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. Originally set out by Microsoft and IBM as a part of the original DOS standard, the original LBA standard assigns an address to each 512-byte sector – the smallest physical block of data on a hard drive.”<\/p>\n
Craig explained that the solution is to “extend that to Long LBA addressing”. “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.”<\/p>\n
Seagate pointed out that the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista and modified versions of Linux will support the new system.<\/p>\n