Seagate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive

Stoobalou writes "After a few weeks of rumours, Seagate's senior product manager Barbara Craig has confirmed that the company is announcing a 3TB drive later this year, but the move to 3TB of storage space apparently involves a lot more work than simply upping the areal density. 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."

Comments

Linux can handle it just fine

[basketcase]

I ran into that a few years ago when I added a 4TB hardware RAID5 to my Linux server. The partition table that is made by fdisk can't handle it. I was forced to use parted to make an EFI partition table instead. It was a little different but completely doable. Took me about 2 minutes on Google to find a howto.

Re:Linux can handle it just fine

[danomac]

You can also create a filesystem on the device without partitioning it. (create a filesystem on /dev/sda instead of /dev/sda1.) No worries about partitioning problems then. I did this on a 3 TB array.

Re:Linux can handle it just fine

[Hal_Porter]

The Bios doesn't know anything about partitioning. It only knows it needs to read sector 0 of a disk into memory at 0x7c00 and jump to it. If the disk is MBR partitioned that's the MBR and the code there knows how to scan the partition table, and load the boot sector of the partition table using INT 13h. If it's not partitioned sector 0 is the boot sector of the partition table already and will use INT 13h to load the OS boot loader.

GPT is different because sector 0 contains a "Protective MBR" that just reserves the whole disk. That doesn't contain any code - EFI Bioses need to read boot code from a special FAT formatted partition (Macs apparently use HFS+ instead). EFI Bioses offer a much more complicated API than the Bios, which is good in some ways (flexibility) and bad in others (more chance of bugs).

But non partitioned disks have always been supported. In fact floppy disks are always non partitioned.

Actually it's a shame that sector 0 of an GPT disk doesn't contain code to load a boot manager that understands GPT to allow booting from a GPT disk with an old fashioned Bios. Or that some way for old style Bioses to boot from disks with a partition table with 64 bit LBAs in wasn't developed - MBR partitioning only has space for 32 bit LBAs. Which means no support for disks bigger than 2TB.

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[larry bagina]

most file systems already use a 4k sector.

Re:Mac OS X

[commodore64_love]

Everything works on Mac, because Apple doesn't support legacy stuff. They assume any Mac older than ~5 years is obsolete, and therefore moved to 64-bit addressing long ago.

(No I'm not trolling. I'm bitter. I had to toss a perfectly good Mac G4, just because Apple stopped supporting it, and its ancient Safari 2 browser could no longer render the web properly.)

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And if their sectors don't fall on a physical boundary, then you've just used 8KB on the physical drive.

100% false.

You still only use 4K on the physical drive. You just have to read & write 8K at a time because the misaligned 4K filesystem block straddles two physical blocks. But since filesystem blocks are packed sequentially there is no wasted space, they are just all misaligned by the same offset.