Seagate ships pro-grade 3TB drive with XP support
updated 01:25 pm EST, Tue March 1, 2011
Seagate begins shipping 3TB Barracuda XP HDD
Introduced in the fall, Seagate has now began shipping its 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive. The highest capacity hard drive is rare in supporting legacy operating systems such as Windows XP, which can't normally support hard drive capacities higher than 2.1TB. DiscWizard software that's available for download ships with the drive and lets the system read and write to, though not boot from, the extra-large drive.
Windows Vista and 7 users, as well as many Mac users, can see the full capacity without software. Booting needs EFI firmware that isn't present on most Windows PCs but which should work with newer Macs.
The Barracuda XT sports a 64MB cache along with a SATA 6Gbps interface to help it accommodate burst speeds. The 3.5-inch hard drive spins at up to 7,200RPM, and allows for an 8.5ms random read seek time. It produces a maximum of 32dB of noise and should be useful for most quiet systems.
Pricing still hasn't been revealed.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2000
Yikes
Cool drive. DiscWizard? Who cares? Macs don't have any problems reading/writing/booting from a 3TB or larger drive. This shouldn't be an issue for Linux users either if the machine supports a thing I believe is called ACPI. If not, just partition it...
Now just think of all the data you could swiftly and easily loose with just a single error or drive failure. Makes the idea of backing up even more important!