Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Finally 3TB hard-drive from Seagate

The disk sizes are decreasing and the storage space increasing. From a long time we've been stuck at 2TB. Not anymore: Seagate announced that it is shipping the industry's first 3TB hard drive, the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external drive.The drive, with a USB 2.0 connector, will sell for $250, which works out to $0.08 per gigabyte.

Why 2 TB Limit?

According to Seagate engineers, the 2 Tera Byte limitation was neither an issue with the file structure ( NTFS) nor a problem with the Windows operating system itself. Rather, the issue lay with the master boot record (MBR) partition table, contained in the first sector of a hard disk drive. The partition table used with Windows XP and earlier Microsoft operating systems was limited to just 2.2TB--which, a decade-plus ago, seemed an unthinkably high number. The table works by using numbers to represent the starting sector and the number of sectors of a partition, and it maxes out at 2.2TB (using 512-byte sector sizes).
Windows Vista and Windows 7 introduced a new partition-table scheme, dubbed GPT (for GUID Partition Table). The GPT blasted past the previous limitations by supporting up to 8 zettabytes.
note: 1024 terabytes = 1 petabyte,1024 petabytes = 1 exabyte, and 1024 exabytes = 1 zettabyte.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 maintain backward compatibility by also reading and writing MBR partitions.

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