WD Launches 3TB Caviar Internal HDD, Breaks 2.2TB Barrier

From DailyTech: Solid State Drives are the speedy choice for many enthusiasts, but some of us still rely on traditional magnetic hard disk drives for our data storage. Even SSD evangelists have to concede that the low cost per gigabyte and large capacities of HDDs mean that it will remain the dominant storage medium for the foreseeable future.

Western Digital Corporation is launching today their latest WD Caviar Green HDDs at 2.5TB and 3TB capacities. These 3.5 inch internal drives have four platters with up to 750GB per platter, and feature 64MB caches and 3Gb/s SATA connections. This is the fifth generation of the company's Green series, which sacrifice some rotational speed and performance for lower power consumption and noise levels.

The largest capacity drives on the market right now top out at 2 terabytes of storage. WD and Seagate have been working on the next generation of HDDs for the last two years, but several problems have held back their market introductions.

Most older operating systems such as Windows XP encounter a capacity barrier at 2.2 TB. The most commonly used sector size is 512 bytes, and those operating systems can only address up to 2^32 logical blocks, limiting the maximum size to 2,199,023,255,552 bytes.

Western Digital tried to introduce Advanced Format (AF) technology using 4 KB (4096 byte) sector sizes, but determined through testing that it is generally not feasible at this time due to many application incompatibilities with devices.

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