Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB is still the first and only harddrive with 3TB capacity. Now that the harddrive has been tested and dissected it becomes clearer why we should not expect any internal equivalent any day soon.
At Anandtech they performed surgery on the new external storage unit and found a normal sized 3.5″ harddrive with five 600GB platters.
The harddrive uses a regular SATA 3.0 Gbps interface and can be connected to computers with USB 2.0, USB 3.0 or eSATA interface, depending on which docking station you choose. Performance looked really good over USB 3.0, better than SATA even.
The problems started when they tried to use the harddrive as a regular internal drive where limitations in Windows and current hardware cause problems with harddrives with more than 2TB storage capacity, due to the limitations of 32-bit addressing. This can be solved through EFI, the sucessor to BIOS, that supports GUID Partition Table and 64-bit LBA addressing.
Seagate’s 3TB 3.5″ harddrive
The harddrive hits 69 degrees Celsius during longer loads, which sounds a bit worrying. In a way it summarizes our feelings for the first 3TB harddrive, that they had to cut corners to reach there.
As we pointed out before, Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB isn’t anywhere near to be found around here. It’s not slated to appear until December.
