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Seagate confirms 3TB hard disk drive will be available before the end of the year

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There have been rumors about Seagate releasing a 3TB drive this year but it just got officially confirmed. Barbara Craig, senior product manager at the company has gone on record saying that “we are announcing a 3TB drive later this year”.

3TB are the next step in storage capacity and pushing those out on the market requires a little bit more than just increasing the aerial density. The current crop of PCs is incapable of handling hard drives with a capacity larger than 2.1 TB as they can’t assign addresses beyond that point.

The logical block addressing (LBA) standard was created back in 1980, when 3TB drives didn’t seem as something to be concerned about. The only operating systems that support the newer Long LBA standard are the 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7 as well as some modified Linux versions.

The other thing needed to make 3TB drives usable is the implementation of a new GUID partition table (GPT) for the master boot record as current master boot record partitions are limited to 2.1TB, too.

Hoping that both issues will be fixed by then, Seagate will launch their first 3TB drives by the end of the year. Looking forward to that!

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