Exclusive: Seagate confirms 3TB drive

Needs UEFI, 64-bit OS and new partition table

“There’s also a GUID partition table (GPT) that needs to be implemented,” explains Craig, “for the master boot record.” Current master boot record partitions are limited to 2.1TB, so a new GPT partition table would also need to be used to see beyond this.

Of course, this is all fine if you’re using a 3TB drive as a secondary disk, but there are more problems to overcome if you want to use that 3TB drive to boot your OS. Unfortunately, the master boot record is a key part of the standard BIOS setup that motherboards have used for decades.  

GPT was originally proposed as a part of Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface [EFI]; a user-friendly setup system designed to replace the clunky ASCII-based BIOS. This specification is now looked after by the United EFI Forum (UEFI), and one of its many new features is a larger LBA addressing scheme, which would enable enough addresses to be handed out to drives with greater capacities than 2.1TB.  

However, this presents a big problem, as many standard motherboards don’t feature a UEFI system. Some manufacturers, such as MSI, have introduced UEFI to a select few boards, but UEFI is still not the de facto standard. What’s more, any RAID drivers, if appropriate, will also need to support Long LBA if you want to put your 3TB drives in an array.  

Basically, with the original LBA limit set at 2.1TB, it seemed pointless for anyone else to prepare for any capacity beyond this, so we now have a situation where many hard drive controllers, BIOSes, drivers and operating systems are all set with caps of 2.1TB, and this is going to take an industry-wide overhaul to overturn.  

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

“On the UEFI standard, we’re going to a Plugfest next month,” he continues, “to ensure that everybody is ready, and the IDEMA Group is also supporting them.” According to Craig, the preparation for the move to 3TB drives has also meant cooperation with other hard drive manufacturers.  

Assuming that all the issues get ironed out, Seagate says that it’s planning to launch its first enterprise-level drives with more than 2.1GB of storage space at the end of this year.