Seagate confirms 3TB drive

Seagate confirms 3TB drives later this year;  will use Long LBA.

http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/17/exclusive-seagate-confirms-3tb-drive/

Very nice to see these drives coming.

A pitty that it looks like it will take a little work for all these components to support these size drives.  Hopefully everyone can work together and get the issue ironed out quickly.

On the bright side, all Mac computers use EFI and by defualt use the GUID partition table scheme for all there drive formatting so Apple should be well on its way to getting 3TB drives in there systems.

I read a different article which also said there might be glitches in some motherboard BIOS that limit the hard-drive capacity to 2.1TB. Now it seems the limitation was in the actual LBA specification.

Now it seems the limitation was in the actual LBA specification.

Please post relevant link.

From what I'm reading this isn't the case, a 64bit LBA supposedly can address 144PB of data.

I wonder if this is another reason to move to 4K sectors on the WD EARS drive?

Well I mostly got that feeling from the link bubbaQ posted, but maybe it's not the actual specification but the defacto implementation of LBA. Or perhaps I read too much into the following explanation. I think the 4K sector changes also plays into the ever growing needs of storage, making for less overhead when addressing sectors.

The root of the problem is the original LBA (logical block addressing) standard, which can’t assign addresses to capacities in excess of 2.1TB. Originally set out by Microsoft and IBM as a part of the original DOS standard, the original LBA standard assigns an address to each 512-byte sector – the smallest physical block of data on a hard drive.

 

Unfortunately, though, the range of addresses is limited to capacities of 2.1TB. It’s a limit that until now has seemed so far off in the future that hardly anyone’s considered it a problem. “I think that’s what everyone thought,” says Craig. “Nobody expected back in 1980 when they set the standard that we’d ever address over 2.1TB.”  

 

Craig explains that “we need to extend that to Long LBA addressing,” in order to get around this. Long LBA basically increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address in the command descriptor block, but it also requires a supporting OS.  

<<...snip...>>

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. 

Check this very good article out:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/06/01/are-we-ready-for-3tb-hard-disks/1

This must be why all the drives are recently dropping in price a great deal.

Any info on UnRAID support for these drives?

I suspect my RB-1200 isn't going to be a good candidate for these, but I wonder how soon I could build a replacement with supporting hardware for 3+TB drives..

I wonder if Drobos will support them, not that It'd make me lament giving them away..

Any info on UnRAID support for these drives?

It isn't unRAID that stops you, it is your BIOS.