Western Digital To Ship 3 TB Hard Disk Drives

Western Digital launched the industry's first 2 TB hard disk drive back in January of 2009, the 2 TB WD Caviar Green. This was followed up by the Hitachi 7K2000 in August 2009 - the first 2 TB hard disk drive with a spindle speed of 7,200 RPM. Unfortunately, there has been no further progress since then.

It was not for a lack of trying though. Every hard disk drive manufacturer in the world has to deal with the problem of the 2.1 TB capacity limit, which was brought about by the LBA addressing limit in 32-bit operating systems. This problem can be solved by switching to 48-bits Long LBA, but this will only work with newer 64-bit operating systems. There was also the issue of updating the GUID Partition Table (GPT) to support Master Boot Record partitions that are larger than 2.1 TB. The good news is that they are close to a solution! Read more at TechARP.