Seagate plans 3TB drive that requires 64-bit OS
updated 03:45 pm EDT, Mon May 17, 2010
Seagate Constellation 3TB confirmed late 2010
Seagate today confirmed that it's making a 3TB hard drive for late this year. Spokeswoman Barbara Craig didn't provide many details to Thinq but explained that the Constellation disk would need a 64-bit OS that supports long logical block addressing (long LBA) to read the entire contents. Older 32-bit platforms may not see more than 2.1TB due to the original LBA, and Windows XP may not even see 1GB of space.
Many computers would also need to support at least the United EFI Forum's firmware standard in order to boot from the drive. New drivers would also be necessary to support RAID and other common configurations that depend on outside hardware to work.
Currently, at least the 64-bit builds of Windows Vista and Windows 7 support the extra space, as do certain versions of Linux. Electronista has reached out for clarification to Seagate on Mac OS X support, but it would likely require at least Snow Leopard or later.
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64-bit confusion
There's no reason at all that this should require a 64-bit OS. It just happens that the versions of Windows that support it are 64-bit...