Seagate announces a 3TB Barracuda XT drive

HARD DRIVE MAKER Seagate has started shipping its 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard disk drive (HDD) that can work with Windows XP and legacy PC BIOS, which had been said to be incompatible with the largest Terabyte capacity hard disk drives.

Maybe it was the Millennium bug, but the IT industry had been awash with claims that HDDs above 2.1TB could not be used by most of yesterday's older PC BIOS and obsolescent Windows computers.

However Seagate's 3.5-inch, 7200RPM 3TB Barracuda XT overcomes that glitch with software called Discwizard that allows a user to configure the computer operating system for a 3TB HDD. Discwizard can be downloaded for free from Seagate's website.

Seagate said, "The Barracuda XT hard drive combines a 64MB cache and 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."

Seagate is a bit late to the party. Western Digital and Hitachi have already released 3TB HDDs. µ