Seagate Technologies, one of the leading makers of hard disk drives (HDDs), said that later this year the company would release hard drives with whopping 3TB capacity. However, in order to make such products popular enough, Seagate will have to solve compatibility problems of those large HDDs with existing personal computers.

“We are announcing a 3TB drive later this year,” said Seagate’s senior product manager Barbara Craig, reports Thinq web-site.

Ms. Craig remained tight-lipped regarding specifications or positioning of the 3TB hard drives. Seagate may release HDDs with increased capacities onto both consumer and enterprise markets.

What is important is that hard drives with 3TB capacity will have to use 4KB sectors (up from 512 bytes on the vast majority of current drives), 64-bit operating system, new logical block addressing (LBA) standard along with new UEFI (universal extensible firmware interface) replacement for BIOS (basic input-output system). All-in-all, many of new technologies have to be implemented in order to enable HDDs with capacities higher than 2.1TB.

However, once all those technologies are implemented, the capacities of hard drivers will be able to grow further without issues with compatibility.

“Although this involves a massive amount of work, many of the partners – you know the operating system, the BIOS, the RAID controllers – everyone has attacked it, and I think about 80% of the infrastructure’s ready to support it,” concluded Ms. Craig.

Tags: Seagate, HDD