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Seagate confirms 3TB hard drive for 2010

You may be excited about Seagate’s new 3TB hard disk drive, but be warned, compatibility will be an issue.

By Jennifer Scott, 18 May 2010 at 11:07

Seagate has confirmed it will launch a 3TB hard disk drive (HDD) later this year but has warned system builders to check their infrastructure is up to scratch before trying to put one in.

The 3.5in drive will be part of the Seagate Constellation ES line, which so far had only reached capacity heights of 2TB.

A spokesperson from the company told IT PRO: "Seagate can indeed confirm that there will be 3TB sometime later this year."

However, she said the reasoning for releasing the information early was "in order to drive awareness/education about the need for people to prepare their systems and be ready for capacities greater than the 2.1TB."

Due to a judgement made almost 30 years ago that capacity would never exceed 2.1TB – which in turn led to the logical block address (LBA) range on a hard drive being limited to 16 bytes per drive sector – many machines will not be able to handle a 3TB HDD.

Barbara Craig, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, claimed in a blog post the capacity limit was more than sufficient for those it the 1980s, but things have clearly changed.

“With the vast amounts of digital content we’re serving up today, we’re now faced with operating systems, BIOS controllers, HDD controllers and device drivers that use the same basic limitation of 2.1TB for the maximum size of a hard drive or logical storage device,” wrote Craig.

She thinks she has the answer.

“Long LBA addressing (LLBA) is needed,” she added. “LLBA extends the number of bytes used in a Command Descriptor Block (a data structure used to format data passed between host computers and hard drives) to allow access to an LBA range that exceeds the 2.1TB limitation.”

Craig concluded that those who wanted to look into using these larger HDDs needed to first look into hardware vendors and their LLBA abilities.

Along with the 3.5in version of this larger capacity Constellation ES drive, a 2.5in for laptops will also become available but neither product was given a confirmed launch date.

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4 comments

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Could you please explain what the heck you meant?

Would you please read this excerpt from your above article and then let me know what it was supposed to mean.

"... capacity would never exceed 2.1TB – which in turn led to the logical block address (LBA) range on a hard drive being limited to 16 bytes per drive sector"

I cannot parse this. It sounds to me as though you're saying that a 16 byte field for an LBA is not big enough to span 3 TB. This is not true so you must have meant to say something else, yes?

By irrationalJohn on Friday May 21

RE:

Essentially the way many machines were designed in the early 80s means that they are not prepared for capacities above 2.1TB as back then that seemed an unachieveable amount.

LBA specifies the location of data blocks and this limited the amount of data able to be stored.

However newer 64 bit systems can handle the increase as they use a newer version of LBA and what Seagate is saying is that to use the higher capacity hard drives, you need to have a newer LBA.

Hope this clarifies.

By Ip_jennifer_scot on Friday May 21

your history of the LBA is incomplete

Yes, I'm familiar with the limitations from the 80's on. The last one I remember was the 128 MiB limitation around the turn of this century. At the time the hardware size of an LBA was 28 bits. It was extended to 48 bits at that time.

None of the articles I've seen mentions the change to a 6 byte LBA which SHOULD be large enough to handle 3 TB. In other words, the change should already have been made. Why was the extension made at that time not enough?

By irrationalJohn on Wednesday May 26

Apologies: I meant to say 128GiB limit

Apologies for the typo in my previous comment. I meant to refer to the 128GiB (~137GB) limit not 128MiB.

By irrationalJohn on Wednesday May 26

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