3TB Seagate HDD Confirmed, Won't Work on Windows XP

Some time ago, it was reported that Seagate, being the HDD market top player that it is, was planning on soon making a very bold move. What the company had in mind was the invention of a hard disk drive with a capacity of no less than 3TB. Now, it appears that the hardware maker has finally decided to go public with this announcement, though not all pieces of news are encouraging, at least for some end-users. Apparently, with the jump to such a high storage space also comes a certain limitation.

Seagate Senior Product Manager Barbara Craig gave details on the implication of the 3TB capacity to Thinq website. What the spokesman went into, however, were not details on the specs of said HDD, but on the actual technology behind it and how it would not work on computers without a compatible OS.

The main problem is that the original LBA (logical block addressing) standard can't assign addresses to HDDs of over 2.1TB. This means that the so-called Long LBA addressing needs to be used instead.

The original LBA assigns an address of 512 bytes to each sector. Long LBA will increase that number of bytes. However, this is only supported by 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows 7 and modified versions of Linux. Windows XP is unsupported and won't even be able to use 2.1TB of the total capacity. In fact, Seagate claims that, according to tests, XP users may only access as little as 990MB.

“There’s also a GUID partition table (GPT) that needs to be implemented,” Mr. Craig explains, “for the master boot record.” “Current master boot record partitions are limited to 2.1TB, so a new GPT partition table would also need to be used to see beyond this.”

According to previous, unconfirmed reports, the first 3TB HDD will use the SAS (Serial Arrached SCSI) 6.0Gbps interface and will be part of the enterprise-aimed Constellation ES line. It should debut before the year is out.