Seagate has eliminated the need to purchase additional hardware or software to surmount the previous 2.1TB drive barrier by releasing its highly anticipated 3TB desktop hard disk drive, the 3.5-in Barracuda XT. The shipment of the first 3TB HDD, the Constellation ES was to happen by the end of 2010, according to Seagate. The shipping of the drive is yet to happen for data center servers. In January, Western Digital came out with the Western Digital Caviar Green, its first 3TB internal desktop drive. With its free DiscWizard utility, Seagate believes that it was able to make the drive’s capacity available to PC systems.

To access capacity beyond the 2.1TB on a drive, Seagate added a virtual device driver to the utility to allow legacy BIOSes and OSes like Windows XP. Volumes only up to 2.1TB can be created by PCs with older OSes and BIOS designs without the driver. For home owners, workstations, high definition video editing and production systems, high performance PC gaming systems and desktop PCs, the Barracuda XT hard drive now delivers the highest available capacity on a single drive. Hard drives with a capacity above 2.1TB cannot be used by Legacy PC BIOS designs and device drivers and older operating systems like Windows XP.

Alternatively, partitions of up to 2.1TB of storage capacity can be used by computers with older platforms. Though they may require extra device drivers to overcome this limitation, they have to be deployed with additional software or hardware. The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard that Intel and IBM introduced in 2007 should be used by PC’s to recognize drives that have a capacity of more than 2.1TB. David Burks, Marketing Director for Seagate believes that before it is broadly adopted, UEFI will remain in a nascent category for a long time.

Burks adds that they strongly desire to come up with a product that doesn’t need UEFI for customers who wish to use the full capacity of these big drives. While the new firmware upgrade on DiscWizard is just a stop gap measure, the UEFI will eventually be the choice across the industry for older OSes and system BIOS to use high-capacity drives. Windows can be used to format and partition the drive and users can install the Barracuda XT in their PCs in the same way as any other drive.

Users are required to download and install the DiscWizard firmware if a 3TB drive is used as Windows XP recognizes only 900GB of hard drive space, while Windows 7 and Windows Vista recognize 2.1TB capacity on the drive. Compared to its 2TB predecessor, there is little difference in the Barracuda XT. The drive has five disk platters against four is the only major difference. A 6Gbit/sec throughput is provided by the Barracuda XT that has a 7200rpm spindle speed and it uses the serial ATA (SATA) 3.0 interface specification. The performance is enhanced strongly by the drives 64MB cache.