Seagate (http://www.seagate.com) has begun shipments of its 3TB Barracuda XT hard drive. It delivers the highest available capacity for home servers and workstations, high-definition video editing and production systems, high-performance computer gaming systems and desktop computers, says Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer service.
Legacy computer BIOS designs and 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 combines a 64MB cache that optimizes burst performance in cache-intensive applications such as gaming and nonlinear video editing with Serial ATA 6Gb/second. The 3.5-inch, 7200RPM drive’s 3TB of storage capacity gives desktop PC users the most space ever available for videos, games, photos and files, says Mosely.