Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB

INTRODUCTION

Desktop storage has been stuck at 2TB for quite a while. Higher platter density is needed in order to break the 3TB barrier, which leads to the industry-wide adaptation of 4K advanced format, replacing the 512 sector that was introduced back in the 80’s. The truth is, hard drive manufacturers are more than capable of making 3TB drives even with the 512 sector. However, we have not seen these drives appear on the market until most recently. The reason behind it is the aging BIOS chips that are unable to recognize and boot off a disk that is larger than 2TB.

In order for a system to boot off a 3TB drive as primary drive, a motherboard must support the new UEFI BIOS. Currently, there are only a handful of motherboards on the market, such as the ASUS P8P67 and the Intel P67 board, that support UEFI BIOS. While some motherboard manufacturers, such as GIGABYTE, found a workaround on their boards without the UEFI BIOS, on most older boards, it is impossible to have the board retro-fitted to support the UFEI BIOS so it can recognize the 3TB drive. Thus, probably more than 90% of systems in existence now will not be able to utilize the 3TB drive as primary drive.

The UEFI BIOS not only adds support for 3TB and larger drives, it also adds support for GUID Partition Table (GPT), another crucial factor for systems that wish to use 3TB drive. Windows editions that support Long LBA are the only OS that will only be able to use the 3TB drive. Furthermore, to utilize the drive, the drive must be formatted as GPT. While Windows Vista and 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) will support 3TB drives as secondary storage drive when the drive is formatted as GUID Partition Table (GPT), only 64-bit of Windows Vista SP1 or Windows 7 are capable of using the drive as primary boot drive, because only the 64-bit version supports the UEFI BIOS. None of the 32-bit Windows and Windows XP 64-bit support UEFI BIOS, which means that they will not be able to use the 3TB drive as the primary drive.

Another hurdle that the hard drive manufacturers need to overcome is the driver support. Luckily, motherboard manufacturers are coming out with drivers that allow the system to recognize the 3TB drives. So as long as the motherboard chipset is fairly recent, users simply have to download the latest driver off the motherboard manufacturer's (or better yet, the chipset manufacturer's) site. The latest Intel Rapid Storage drive adds support for 3TB drive to not only the latest 6 series Sandy Bridge chipset, but also to many previous chipsets.

Finally, all of the hurdles have been cleared and hard drive manufacturers are releasing 3TB to the market. This means that soon, we may even see hard drives go beyond 3TB.

Seagate has shipped us their first 3TB Barracuda XT drive for the consumer market. Let's take a look.