3TB Hard Drive

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Highly Rated and Best-Selling 3TB Hard Drive Models

WD My Book Essential 3 TB External Hard Drive

Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB 5400 RPM SATA III 64 MB Cache Desktop Hard Drive

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3 TB External Hard Drive

view the full list of top rated 3TB hard drives here >>

The 3TB Hard Drive

A hard disk drive (also commonly referred to as the HDD) can be simply described as a device that allows anyone access to digital data. A hard disk drive houses data in a non-volatile environment and can operate even under random access conditions- which simply means that anyone is free to retrieve or input data into a HDD at any moment. Physically, a hard disk drive will come with rotating rigid platters that spin on a spindle that is motor driven. This mechanism occurs in a protected casing and it constantly runs while the hard disk drive is turned on. As the spindle revolves at a constant pace, data is magneticallywritten unto (or read from) the platter by write/read heads positioned just above the platters itself. The very first hard drive was introduced by IBM in 1956. Since then, the HDD has been reinvented until it is now dramatically smaller in size, but larger in terms of capacity. Today's hard disk drives also operate on high-speed serial interfaces known as serial ATA (SATA) or serial attached SCSI (SAS).

In the beginning, it seemed as though the introduction of the 1TB hard drive into the consumer market would be the answer to all of our digital storage problems but the 1.5TB hard drive followed soon thereafter, followed by the 2TB hard drive.

The Seagate 3TB Hard Drive

While IBM may have been the pioneer, Seagate is the first company to introduce the actually 3TB hard drive to the market. The dawn of the 3TB hard drive signals a large improvement in terms of understanding IT hardware as plenty of companies before Seagate have grappled with the 3TB hard drive idea but to no avail, mostly due to the problem of getting a random PC to boot from a hard disk drive that is larger than a 2.2TB capacity.

In order to bypass this 2.2TB limit, one would be required to build a GUID partition table (GPT) in the hard drive's master boot record which is easily done on a 64-bit operating system (i.e. Windows Vista, Windows 7). Unfortunately, those who are still using Windows XP on a 32-bit operating system may find themselves still limited to the 2.2TB quota.

Seagate has explained that to solve this problem, 4KB sectors were used to circumvent the partition table (as opposed to the standard 512-byte sectors). 4KB sectors are nominated as a solution as that is the smallest amount of addressable space. By performing this exercise, you HDD would now require fewer addresses as compared to a standard drive.

The second part to the solution requires Seagate's SmartAlign technology that tricks the master boot record into assuming that the 3TB hard drive is running with 512-byte sectors, as opposed to 4KB. This is done in order to ensure that the 3TB hard drive will be compatible with your computer and vice versa. For an extra USD50 top-up, the Seagate 3TB hard drive also comes with a USD 2 interface plus the option of plugging-in an extra module just in case you require a USB 3 (USD40) or FireWire interface at the same time. The Seagate 3TB hard drive 3TB hard drive is priced at USD250 for a standard USDB2.0 adapter, which is pretty reasonable considering that it is the first of its kind.

The 3TB hard drive, commercially known as the Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS, is marketed as a great accessory for movie buffs, music lovers and hardcore gamers. Numerically speaking, a 3TB hard drive will be able to store up to over 1,500 video games, 120 high-definition movies and an unlimited number of digital music.

The Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB hard drive

Priced slightly cheaper at USD239, Western Digital becomes the second company to market their very first 3TB hard drive under the fifth generation Caviar Green product line. The unit is marketed as a product that has high performance, a large capacity and is also energy saving because it operates at lower temperatures. Just like any other Caviar Green product, the 3TB hard drive by Western Digital also operates quietly, thereby reducing noise pollution.

Other Ways of Bypassing the 2.2TB Limit

Gigabyte, a company most renowned for its motherboard technology has also recently unveiled a new software utility that will allow the users access to large hard drives even on 32-bit systems. The first task would be to first create virtual drives up to a maximum of 2 TB each using the Gigabyte utility. These virtual drives are also required to be compatible with recent chipsets such as the AMD 800 series and Intel's X58, P67 and H67.

Following that, the 3TB hard drive is created by installing and utilizing the 3TB+ Unlock Preinstall driver. At this point of writing, Gigabyte is currently working on adding more support for older chipsets in order to expand the compatibility of the utility.