Windows 7 Seagate Releases New 3TB Drive That Works in Older Systems

reghakr

Essential Member
Joined
Jan 26, 2009
Location
Erie, PA
Seagate Overcomes "2.1GB Barrier" with New Drive, Software

Seagate Technology on Tuesday unveiled its new hard disk drive (HDD) that it proclaims to be the easiest to deploy HDD with 3TB capacity. The drive features a number of internal improvements and comes with a special program that allows it to offer 3TB capacity on older systems with older Link Removed due to 404 Error. Besides, thanks to 7200rpm spindle speed, it will be among the fastest drives of that capacity on the market.

The latest Seagate Barracuda XT is based on five platters (instead of four) and does not use 4KB sectors (the so-called advanced format), but features enterprise-grade electronics that ensures high performance, compatibility as well as additional reliability of the product. The new family offers 2TB and 3TB capacities, 7200rpm spindle speed, 64MB cache as well as Serial ATA-600 interface. The manufacturer declares 4.16ms average latency as well as maximum sustained data read of 138MB/s for 2TB model and 149MB/s for 3TB flavour.

But the most important thing about the new drive is that it is fully compatible with older systems featuring BIOS as well as Windows XP operating system. As reported, legacy PC BIOS designs, device drivers and older operating systems such as Windows XP are incapable of using hard drive capacities beyond 2.1TB. The upshot is that existing desktop drives with more than 2.1TB of storage capacity must be deployed with additional software or hardware and may also require extra device drivers to overcome this limitation.

The Barracuda XT hard drive with free Seagate DiscWizard™ software is a complete, easy-to-deploy solution. DiscWizard software makes it simple to configure the computer operating system and device drivers to access the full 3TB of capacity on legacy systems using Windows XP and PC BIOS and on personal computers equipped with newer versions of Windows or the new UEFI BIOS. The DiscWizard creates a virtual ~900GB (or different) drive in order to let the operating system recognize it. The new DiscWizard software is available for free download from the company's web-site. Thanks to the fact that BIOS still sees the drive, the Barracuda XT can even be used as bootable HDD for older systems.

“Seagate is squarely focused on delivering the storage performance, capacity and innovation to ensure that technology transitions remain seamless for our customers. The Barracuda XT hard drive epitomizes our commitment to providing end-user customers and PC manufacturers with the world’s most advanced storage solutions," said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer service.

The Barracuda XT 3TB drive from Seagate has manufacturer suggested retail price of $279, which is higher compared to competing offerings. Still, according to Seagate, actual price on the market may be lower.

Source: Link Removed due to 404 Error
 
and does not use 4KB sectors (the so-called advanced format), but features enterprise-grade electronics that ensures high performance, compatibility as well as additional reliability of the product.
Lousy reporting when they make statements like that. If it does not use 4Kb sectors, what does it use? Bigger or smaller? Turns out the Seagate Data Sheet didn't list it either. Made me wonder why? Is that spec a problem?

Well it is a 3Tb drive and Seagate does say it has a 5,860,533,168 "Guaranteed Sectors" so 3Tb / 5,860,533,168 = 511.898. Close enough to call it 512 bytes. That sounds like a step backwards to me.
 
Back
Top Bottom