Too big for XP and too cool to boot
Seagate has officially confirmed that it will introduce a 3TB
drive later this year. In a chat with Thinq, Seagate's Senior Product
Manager Barbara Craig confirmed the plans and noted that getting to 3TB
is not as easy as it seems.
Due to logical block addressing (LBA) limitations inherited from DOS,
it is impossible to increase storage size beyond 2.1TB without
introducing a new LBA standard. Seagate did just that, by extending LBA
to Long LBA addressing and increasing the number of bytes used to
define addresses. However, Long LBA is not supported by older operating
systems, such as Windows XP. Hence, only Vista and Windows 7 users can
hope to use the new drives.
This might not sound like a major issue, as most users have already
migrated to more recent operating systems, but booting from the new
drives is also troublesome. Most current motherboards can't cope with
Long LBA due to BIOS and controller limitations. Despite this, Craig is
optimistic and believes the industry will embrace the new standard by
year's end.
More
here.