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Seagate isn’t broadcasting it yet, but the world’s largest disk drive-making company is moving ever closer to demonstrating the world’s first 3TB hard drive for laptops and desktops.
Easier engineered than done, apparently. Seagate product manager Barbara Craig told tech blog Gearlog a few days ago that the drive might be ready by the end of the year. She also said that move from the current high-capacity 2TB drives to 3TB involves a lot more than just cramming more bit space into the areal density.
“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,” Craig said in a report. This is an issue that’s been lurking since Microsoft and IBM developed the original DOS storage standard way back in 1980.
However, Seagate is working within the standards organizations to get this changed. It’s inevitable that the standard it will be upgraded; it’s simpy a matter of when.
With the 3TB drive, Seagate continues to push PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) to the max, it seems.
PMR is a newly implemented technology for data recording on hard disks that was first demonstrated in Japan in 1976. The technique is capable of delivering up to 10 times the storage density of conventional longitudinal recording–on the same media. There were some attempts to use PMR in floppy disks in the 1980s, but it was not reliable enough. Today there is new interest in using it in HDDs, which are quickly reaching their space limits.
Meanwhile, Seagate and OEM customer ASUS in May 26 will co-sponsor a live Webcast unveiling not only the new solid state hybrid drive, Momentus XT, but also the new ASUS ROG G73JH system with two Momentus XT drives.
Seagate’s Mike Hall tells The Station that three attendees of this Webcast will win a new G73 system just for attending. In addition, special guest speaker and famous gaming reviewer N’Gai Croal will provide an in-depth review of the new G73 powered by Momentus XT and how this system is expected to upgrade the concept of high-performance computing.
To register for this live Webcast, go here.