Seagate has confirmed that it will be officially announcing a 3TB hard disk drive (HDD) later this year. According to PC World, the new drive will be part of Seagate's Constellation ES family and will come with a 6Gbit/s SAS interface.  A report from Slashgear is that it will "presumably" spin at a standard 7,200 rpm. That's the good news.

At 3TB though, the HDD is effectively beyond the maximum bounds of LBA, or logical block addressing standard. LBA was set by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) as part of the original DOS standard. LBA could only address up to 2.1TB of space, as "nobody expected back in 1980 when they set the standard that we'd ever address over 2.1TB," says Seagate's senior product manager, Barbara Craig.

Seagate circumvented the limitations by creating Long LBA addressing, which increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address space. OS support is required however, and while the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and Vista will work--Windows XP will not. In fact, Seagate says that its own tests have shown that using Windows XP could result in as little as 990MB of a 3TB drive being available. 

In addition, using a hard disk with 3TB of capacity as the primary disk also proves to be problematic due to the limitation of the existing master boot record. So unless you are using it as a secondary drive, a GUID partition table (GPT) will have to be implemented to make it work.

Other problems exist as well, since many hard drive controllers, BIOSes, and drivers are simply hardcoded to 2.1TB. Ultimately, an industry-wide effort is necessary to get everything in line before 3TB HDDs can see widespread deployment.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at PC World
- check out this article at Thinq 

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