Western Digital ships the industry's first serial ATA (SATA) 3TB internal hard drive
The WD Caviar Green 2.5TB and 3TB hard drives run at 5400 RPMs and are designed for use as secondary external storage systems and internal desktop drives in 64-bit systems, meaning the drives will not work with older operating systems like the still widely-used Windows XP.
Newer operating systems, such as Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X do support 4K drive sectors.
Linux-based systems require Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware to run the new drives. Most new Linux systems are UEFI capable.
The previous 2.19TB capacity ceiling was set about 30 years ago when a decision was made to limit the logical block address (LBA) range on a hard drive. The LBA specifies where blocks of data are stored on a hard drive.
The industry leaders decided in the early 1980s the to limit the LBA range to 16 bits per drive sector because "they never thought we'd go beyond a 2.1TB drive." Software and hardware manufacturers now need to adjust everything from the operating system to the basic input/output system (BIOS) to be able to read larger LBAs
WD Caviar Green 2.5TB hard drives (model number WD25EZRSDTL) and 3TB hard drives (model number WD30EZRSDTL) are available now in the U.S. with a suggested retail price of $189.00, $239.00, respectively. WD Caviar Green hard drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty.
Momentus® Laptop Hard Drives
Seagate® Momentus® hard drives deliver high capacity and performance along with innovative technology, such as self-encryption and free-fall sensors. If you require feature-rich, reliable, robust and secure laptop storage, Momentus drives are for you. Now with FIPS 140-2 Validated models available.
- 750 GB
- 640 GB
- 500 GB
- 320 GB
- 250 GB
- 160 GB
- Encryption
- Encryption/FIPS
- G-Force
- None
- SATA 3Gb/s
- 16MB
- 8MB
- 7200
- 5400
