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

2TB with 512-byte sectors

[crow]

If you move to 4K sectors, that should change the limit to 16TB, meaning that this shouldn't be an issue for several years. Why would you want .5K sectors on such a large drive anyway?

Not a huge deal

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA:

According to Seagate, this includes the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista, as well as modified versions of Linux, but it doesn’t include Windows XP. Not only that, but you may not even be able to see 2.1TB of a 3TB drive when using Windows XP.

Sure, Windows XP won't allow it - but your grandmother who is still running XP isn't going out to buy a 3 TB drive. The early adopters who want or need this are the ones who are already running a compatible OS.

Re:How long can the growth last?

[0123456]

Without multi-core, Moore's law would have ended recently.

Since Moore's law is about the number of transistors on a die and nothing to do with performance (except to the extent that more transistors allows higher performance), multiple cores are irrelevant: we could be running Pentium-4s with 16MB of cache instead of hexa-cores with 12MB of cache and Moore's Law would be just as valid.

Re:How long can the growth last?

[kimvette]

I'm just interested in how much longer we can expect to see capacity gains like this.

Do you know how long that question has been asked, and how many times "theoretical limits" would be reached within a year at the current rate, and each time, new techniques have been developed which increase density many times more than anyone previously imagined? I think storage density will be increasing for that much longer.

15 years ago when you were paying $500 for a 320MB hard drive, did you ever anticipate your home PC would someday have a capacity of multiple terabytes? Could you imagine that a laptop would ever be able to hold over a terabyte? The capacity we have nowadays is staggering, and when back when you had your 320MB to 512MB hard drive and were thinking "I'll never fill this up" only a few were bothering with MP3s and PVR technologies (I bought my first video capture/TV tuner card around that time) and I'll bet few ever fathomed that a user could fill terabytes' worth of hard drives. Now it's cheap to build home recording studios, or even engage in amateur independent movie production with only a few hundred dollars' worth of equipment, running free software.

It's amazing, and with storage capacity growth increasing (not decreasing) we'll find new ways to fill up the storage media, very likely doing things we haven't anticipated even today.