Seagate confirms 3TB hard disk on the horizon

(Credit: Quick Tech News)

You might be impressed with your new 1-terabyte hard drive, but sources at Seagate have confirmed plans to announce a new drive later this year with 3 terabytes of storage space.

According to Thinq.co.uk, Seagate senior product manager Barbara Craig reports that many of today's PCs literally weren't made to handle hard-drive capacities above 2.1TB, a cap set in place by the original DOS standard back in 1980.

Thirty years later, many desktop systems already include hard drives reaching 1TB capacities, leading vendors like Seagate to revisit range limiting, but modern system issues reach deeper than just the DOS standard.

For example, Craig also explains that only the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista are compatible with the new Logical Block Addressing (LBA) needed to recognize drives like Seagate's 3TB big boy. In fact, users running a 32-bit version of Vista or XP might only see as little as 990MB of a 3TB drive due to such shortcomings, according to Seagate's tests.

Fortunately, there's light spinning at the end of this tunnel. Seagate reportedly plans to launch its first enterprise-level drive with more than 2.1TB of storage by the end of this year, and we're hoping consumer drives will follow shortly after.