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."

does it work with Windows 98?

[alen]

i have to know because i have a Win98 PC that i use to play some old games and i wanted to upgrade it

3TB - that's all you'll ever need!

[filesiteguy]

I can see the reviews coming in now stating that "3 terabytes is all you'll ever need to store your documents and information."

Takes me back...

[Verteiron]

I had a sudden and vivid memory of the little blue ASCII box displayed by the special Western Digital bootloader I needed to bypass my old BIOS's 2GB drive size limit.

Re:does it work with Windows 98?

[aardwolf64]

I think you could probably install EVERY game from the 90s on that hard drive and still have 2.09 TB left over. :-)

Re:3TB - that's all you'll ever need!

[The MAZZTer]

Yes, "documents".

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[maxume]

Yeah, you would only be able to store 800 million of your oddly small files on this new drive. What a disaster.

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[poetmatt]

because then we wouldn't be using NTFS.

Re:Takes me back...

[jspayne]

I remember upgrading systems from DOS 3.3 to 4.0 to support larger than 32Mb hard drives. Now get off of my lawn!

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[twidarkling]

Seriously? If you've got a 3TB drive, are you seriously suggesting a person be counting wasted bytes? You lose more space than what you're suggesting just in the conversion from "vendor measurement" to "OS measurement" of space on the disk.

Re:does it work with Windows 98?

[hedwards]

Eh, just install Linux. You can then install a Cron script to randomly reboot the system at odd intervals. Bonus points if you make it see how important the work you're doing is and crash after you've been more than 10 minutes without saving.

Same experience exactly.

Re:Mac OS X

[M8e]

Some dude had to buy 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:Legacy be damned.

[SIR_Taco]

why did they bother with 3TB? Should the next step be 4TB? We are counting in binary are we not?

Ok.... then lets call it an 11TB drive then and the next one can be an 100TB drive :)

Re:How long can the growth last?

[gemada]

as long as there is porn, the growth will continue (pun intended)

Re:2TB with 512-byte sectors

[Bing Tsher E]

Quick access means updating from a mechanical to an optical paper tape reader.

nominees of the future

[tverbeek]

Am I the only one who misread this as "Senate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive"? I didn't even know that machines could be nominated to the Supreme Court!