Seagate Unveils the First Hard Disk Drive Featuring 1 TB Per Platter

Seagate Unveils The World's First Hard Drive Featuring 1 TB Per PlatterMay 3, 2011 – Seagate Technology LLC unveiled the world’s first 3.5-inch hard disk drive featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter, breaking the 1TB areal density barrier to help meet explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both home and office.

Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB Hard Disk Drive

Seagate’s GoFlex Desk products are the first to feature the new hard disk drive, delivering storage capacities of up to 3TB and an areal density of 625 Gigabits per square inch, the industry’s highest. Seagate is on track to ship its flagship 3.5-inch Barracuda desktop hard disk drive with 3TBs of storage on 3 disk platters – which can provide enough capacity to store up to 120 high-definition movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or virtually countless hours of digital music – to the distribution channel in mid-2011. The hard drive will also be available in capacities of 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB.

“Organizations of all sizes and consumers worldwide are amassing digital content at light speed, generating immense demand for storage of digital content of every imaginable kind, we remain keenly focused on delivering the storage capacity, speed and manageability our customers need to thrive in an increasingly digital world.” – said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.

GoFlex Desk external hard drives are compatible with both the Windows® and Mac® computers. Each drive includes an NTFS driver for Mac, which allows the drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting. The GoFlex Desk external drive’s sleek black 3.5-inch design sits either vertically or horizontally to accommodate any desktop environment.

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How to break the 2.1TB Barrier With Barracuda XT Hard Drives

How to break the 2.1TB Barrier With Barracuda XT Hard DrivesUntil recently, using a hard drive larger than about 2.1TB has been difficult from a technical perspective. Back in the early 1980s when many of the fundamental hardware and software designs for computers were created, no one could fathom a hard drive approaching even 1TB, so limiting the logical block address (LBA) range to 2.1TB was thought to be more than adequate. As a result, operating systems, BIOS controllers, host interface drivers and device drivers have used the same basic limitation of 2.1TB.

Newer versions of Windows (Windows Vista and Windows 7), when combined with a new BIOS called UEFI and when configured correctly, have the native capability of using hard drives larger than 2.1TB. The problem, however, is that UEFI BIOS systems are less prevalent and more expensive than legacy PC BIOS systems. Also, Windows XP systems still represent a sizable portion of the installed base. So what do you do if you want to use one of the new
high-capacity hard drives coming to market that exceeds this 2.1TB limit?

Solution to break the 2.1TB Barrier With Barracuda XT Hard Drives:

Seagate has broken the 2.1TB barrier by developing a creative solution which allows you to utilize all of your hard drive capacity over two or more partitions when the drive is larger than 2.1TB. The new Seagate® Barracuda® XT 3TB hard drive has been released(See another post: https://www.datarecoveryunion.com/seagate-barracuda-xt-3tb-desktop-hard-drive/), and it includes free access to our updated Seagate DiscWizard™ software. This newest version of the popular hard drive utility from Seagate now includes functionality that allows you to easily configure a virtual device driver to access all of your hard drive capacity.1 It’s simple, fast and free.

Step 1. Locate the Software.
If you purchase a Seagate® retail kit, DiscWizard™ software will be included on the CD that is packaged inside. Otherwise, you are welcome to download DiscWizard software from the Seagate website. You can find it easily starting here: www.seagate.com/beyond-2TB

Step 2. Prepare Your System.
Time to open up the system, mount the drive and attach the SATA cable. It’s really quite simple to do. Tens of thousands of people add new hard drives every day! If you need a few pointers, please review some of the internal drive installation tutorials and flash presentations available online at www.seagate.com/support. Remember to handle your new drive with care.

Step 3. Install DiscWizard™ Software.
Restart your Windows system. After it finishes its normal preliminary startup routine, install the DiscWizard software application. You’ll see a new icon on your Desktop that looks like this:

DiscWizard

Step 4. Think About Your Plan, Start DiscWizard Software and Follow the Prompts.
Not everyone plans to use a drive the same way. You may be adding the new drive as secondary storage, or you may be migrating your old drive (Windows, applications, data, etc.) to your new drive. You may want to split the drive into drive letters. And on and on. DiscWizard software is a very versatile disk management utility—with easy-to-follow menu choices and questions; it will handle anything your system and OS will allow.

Step 5. A Few Words About Drives >2.1TB
As mentioned earlier, there are several capacity limitations that appear at 2.2TB. Any systems built before 2011 and using a drive greater than 2.1TB will need a device driver to access the terabytes above 2.1TB. DiscWizard software will automatically detect and offer to install the appropriate driver for your Windows OS and hardware (Windows 7, Visa or XP, 64- or 32-bit). The driver will mount the remainder capacity above 2.1TB as a new drive letter, usually D:. This new drive is also limited to a maximum of 2.1TB, so this will be repeated as necessary. A future 6.6TB drive will have three drive letters—C: managed by native Windows drivers; D: and E: drives managed by the DiscWizard driver.

The DiscWizard™ Extended Capacity Manager is intuitive and simple to use:

DiscWizard™ Extended Capacity Manager

Step 6. Enjoy Your New Seagate Drive and Keep DiscWizard Software Installed
DiscWizard software provides continuing value during the life of your drive. In addition, you can use the software to make image backups of your computer that may be useful if problems arise with your system or data.

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Seagate Today Began Shipments of Barracuda XT 3TB Desktop Hard Drive

Barracuda XTBarracuda® XT Combines Highest Desktop Storage Capacity Ever Available with High-End Performance

Seagate today began shipments of the industry’s most elegant, easy-to-install 3TB desktop drive(Barracuda® XT hard drive) – a product that eliminates the need to purchase extra hardware or software to overcome the 2TB barrier. The Barracuda XT hard drive delivers the highest available capacity for home servers and workstations, high-definition video editing and production systems, high-performance PC gaming systems and desktop PCs.

Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB hard drive for desktop PCs

Legacy PC 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 with free Seagate DiscWizard™ software is a complete, easy-to-deploy solution. DiscWizard software makes it simple to configure the computer operating system and device drivers to access the full 3TB of capacity on legacy systems using Windows XP and PC BIOS and on personal computers equipped with newer versions of Windows or the new UEFI BIOS.

“Seagate is squarely focused on delivering the storage performance, capacity and innovation to ensure that technology transitions remain seamless for our customers, the Barracuda® XT hard drive epitomizes our commitment to providing end-user customers and PC manufacturers with the world’s most advanced storage solutions.” – said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer service.

The Barracuda XT hard drive combines a 64MB cache that optimizes burst performance in cache-intensive applications such as PC gaming and nonlinear video editing with Serial ATA 6Gb/s – an interface that delivers the highest system throughput – to enable the highest performance available in a desktop hard drive. 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.

The Barracuda XT 3TB hard drive launch comes only months after Seagate introduced the Barracuda® Green hard drive, another Seagate desktop drive that streamlines technology transitions to simplify drive installations for PC makers and consumers. The eco-friendly Barracuda Green hard drive features Seagate’s SmartAlign™ technology to enable all the benefits of the new 4K sector standard while simplifying drive installation. SmartAlign technology works by eliminating the need for utilities often required to ensure optimum drive performance.

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