Seagate has confirmed it will be introducing a 3TB hard drive later this year. The move to over 2TB capacities will showcase some limitations with legacy programming code in many PCs, which prevents them from addressing over 2.1TB of storage.
Seagate has confirmed it will be introducing a 3TB hard drive later this year. The move to over 2TB capacities will showcase some limitations with legacy programming code in many PCs, which prevents them from addressing over 2.1TB of storage.
The original Logic Block Addressing (LBA) standard developed by IBM and Microsoft in the early 1980s assigns an address to each 512-byte hard drive sector; the range of LBA addresses is limited to 2.1TB, however. The solution to the problem is Long LBA, which doubles the amount of addresses but requires an operating system that supports it. Windows Vista and 7 (64-bit) both support LBA, however Windows XP does not. It is not known whether Windows XP users will even be able to use the 3TB Seagate drive.
