Back in June 2010, Seagate shipped the initial 3TB disc drive, the Barracuda XT, which has been only available in external storage options, for instance another hard disk drive or even the BlackArmor NAS servers. Today the company announced the primary standalone version of the drive that consumers can get and use with their desktop computers.
Seagate disc drive carries a good reason for that delay, however. The company says it wanted in your own time and discover a simple way to produce the Seagate disc drive support Windows XP, that is still popular, including while using drive because the system's main disk drive. Previous to this, both Western Digital and Hitachi announced 3TB hard disks with some other methods to supporting legacy os's. Neither permits booting, however.
The true reason for this incompatibility is that 32-bit Windows operating systems generally don't use anything but the legacy master boot record (MBR), that includes a cap partition size 2.19TB, to regulate the hard drive. Consequently the system won't see more than 2.19TB of storage, regardless of how much bigger the hard drive's actual capacity is.
In addition to that, Windows computers which use BIOS (basic input/output system) -based motherboards, that happen to be the majority of computers on the market, can't boot from a volume that's larger than 2.19TB, either, due to the limitation of BIOS protocols. While this problem can be solved in the near future by replacing MBR with GUID Partition Table and BIOS with the new Extensible Firmware Interface, you will still find many existing computers, specially those that run Windows XP, that will forget the very best storage capacity. Unless they choose the modern Barracuda XT, that is.
Seagate hard disk drive claims that it is new DiscWizard software permits you to utilize new 3TB drive's entire capacity, regardless if the Seagate hard drive is employed to be a bootable main drive. If the OS has become installed on the modern hard disk on the partition how the OS can recognize, and that is small compared to 3TB, you are able to install DiscWizard, which include special drivers that allow the OS to realize other hard drive's capacity and turn that into a second partition.
To put it differently, it is possible to utilize the 3TB Barracuda XT with Windows XP, as being a main hard disk, by 50 percent separate partitions that total 3TB, and not like a single 3TB volume. Although not really a perfect solution, it's a good one, due to the fact Western Digital's 3TB hard drive requires an add-in card whilst still being is only able to are a 2nd hard disk drive inside a computer. When used with EFI and Windows Vista /7 64-bit version, the 3TB Barracuda XT will function such as a normal 3TB hard disk.
The important news here isn’t that Seagate hard drive have pushed platter density any higher, but that its engineers have overcome another, equally problematic technical hurdle. Older drives used master boot record (MBR) partition tables and 512-byte sectors, which gave a hard limit of an little over 2TB. Modern operating systems are compatible with the newer GUID partition table, that includes a limit of 8 zettabytes utilizing the same sector size.
Older os's, for instance still-popular Or windows 7, aren’t competent to read from drives using the newer partition tables. To maintain compatibility, the crafty engineers at Seagate hard drive have used larger 4KB sectors. This means that, although higher capacities fit inside that old MBR partition tables, but capacity is increased on account of wasting fewer bytes within the headers before you start of each sector. Clever, eh?
However, this raises other concerns. Even on newer os's, many applications still expect 512-byte sectors. Windows Vista and 7 (as well as Linux and OSX) know this, so nicely package eight 512-byte blocks into each 4K sector. XP is again the condition child though, given it isn’t ‘aware’ from the 4K sectors. This means that it is going to seek to split a 512-byte block across two on the 4K sectors, adding a lot of overhead and usually slowing everything down. Thankfully, Seagate hard drive has this one covered too, through the use of its SmartAlign technology to make certain all data fits properly into your 4K sectors, even on Or windows 7.
Not in the raw tech, Seagate hard drive has remained largely tight-lipped within the specs with the new 3.5in drive inside external casing. The main one specification that's certain, though, would be that the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk will ship having a USB 2.0 interface. This is a huge disappointment for a really colossal drive, mainly because it requires hours, in any other case days, to fill the unit. We feel this one has somewhat missed the purpose by not shipping with a faster interface straight out of the box, but they are still excited to find out this type of high-capacity drive come to market. If no other, this could mean cheaper 1GB and 2GB drives will follow shortly.