Hard disk capacity has fought to keep up with the explosion in data, and by and large, the hard drive vendors have kept up a decent pace of increasing capacity. But as it turns out, an old legacy design in your existing PC means the PC you own now will never be able to access a drive larger than a certain size.
Hardware Central checks out news of Seagate’s new 3TB hard drive and the changes that have to be made in existing PC structure in order to support it.
Seagate is preparing a three-terabyte (3TB) capacity hard drive, but thanks to limitations in existing motherboards, no PC currently on the market will be able to use it, and this isn’t an issue that can be fixed with a simple BIOS update.
The snag is due to an antiquated limitation in the PC architecture, which runs from the notebook to the server in the x86 environment. When Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) devised the original DOS standard back in the 1980s, they set the logical block addressing (LBA) on mass storage to 512-byte sectors. That’s the smallest physical block of data on a hard drive.