October 6, 201015 yr The official news of the external 3TB WD drive is out. Snippet from http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20101005213016_Western_Digital_Unleashes_3TB_External_Hard_Drive.html The hard drives with 3TB capacity 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). Since Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 3TB is an external solution, it does not need to work with BIOS/UEFI and hence the only requirement is probably a modern 64-bit operating system. Such limitation forces HDD makers to release 3TB hard drives in external form-factor. Earlier this year Seagate released an external 3TB HDD. WD My Book Essential 3TB has manufacturer's suggested retail price of $249.
October 6, 201015 yr Interesting to see 3TB disks appearing soon. Seems like Seagate might have a bit of trouble bringing their disks to the shelves: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/05/19/seagate-confirms-3tb-drives/1 These 3TB+ disk seems to be another Hardware/Software limitation which might hamper the release of these disks too (that and the costs too), like when 130GB+ disks came out a long time ago .
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