Seagate was the first company to release a 3TB drive, but that was a model only suitable for use as an external (portable) drive. While there are ways around the issue, but it's a fairly large inconvenience and certainly a big problem for small form factor PCs (SFF) that only have room for a single hard drive. Without these changes, a computer wouldn't recognize all of the available space, which also meant that any hard drive greater than 2.1TB wouldn't be bootable. The best solution was to divide the drive into smaller partitions, but this also required hardware changes such as adding a special mass storage card inside the computer or even replacing the PC's main board. Until now, there was no simple way around the 2.1TB limit.
Hardware Tweaks Necessary for Drives > 2.1 TB
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Obviously, that's changed, which is why Vista and Windows 7 were both designed to handle larger hard drives. That's because of a decision in the early 1980s to place a limit on what's known as the logical block address, which is the system that decides where to physically arrange and place data on a drive.Īt the time it seemed inconceivable that such huge drives would ever exist. 2.1 TB Size Limitation Imposed in the 1980sīy default, Windows XP and earlier systems have an internal limitation that can only read hard drives that are smaller than 2.1TB. For the record, 3 TB is equivalent to 3,000 GB (gigabytes), which is an awful lot of information. It's the first drive of its kind (and size) that can work smoothly with Windows XP. Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has launched a 3 terabyte (TB) internal hard drive.