A hard drive is a marvel of modern technology, having undergone immeasurable advancements, and numerous technologies still plan to keep it progressing. It is the fundamental part of any modern computer system for storing programs and files. It consists of circular platters coated with magnetic material that serves as the recording medium. Though it made its debut as an internal hard disk, today external storages are gaining popularity to combat threats and cater to different needs. The progressive trend has introduced the 3 tb hard drive, which is capable of storing countless hours of digital music, innumerable photographs and a considerable number of HD movies and video games. Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital are the three major manufacturers of this helful device.
The 3 tb hdd has a storage capacity of 3 terrabytes, where each terabyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes. It is more than one trillion bytes, or precisely 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. It is an amazing advancement from the 1980’s home computer systems, which had a storage capacity of just 20 megabytes. With the emergence of graphic, music files, video files, photo software, desktop publishing software and home studios, storage is considered an investment. The first 3tb harddrive was introduced as an external data storage, and it can be installed as an auxiliary storage. There are some technical hassles in deploying this drive. This is because in most operating systems, the boot sector, where BIOS gets the code about the hard disk is not capable of booting from drives larger than 2 terrabytes.
The legacy addressing scheme is based on the formula 2^32*512=2.2tb, where 2 implies binary, 32 refers to the number of bits permitted in legacy disk address, and 512 refers to the number of bytes in each data block of legacy hard drive.The technical hassle is solved by GUID (Global Unique Identifier), a partition table that addresses capacities larger than 2 tb, and it is a part of the EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) system of Intel. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI refers to the alliance that took up the EFI project in 2005, in order to standardize it. Therefore GPT replaces the earlier MBR, i.e., Master Boot Record, which is confined to the 2.2 tb limit. Windows operating systems have MBR’s limitations, but Mac operating systems and 64-bit Linux operating systems have no hassles in booting from 3 tb drives. It is possible to use the entire capacity of 3 tb drive using USB and an enclosure to support it. In this case, a SATA-to-USB chip within the enclosure handles the addressing hassles. This is the reason why the first model was introduced as a external PC data storage.
These little helpful devices are perfect for using programs that need to be secured from Trojans and viruses that may corrupt the main drives while working online. Finance programs, spreadsheets and sensitive documents can be stored on the external drive and switched off while surfing the Internet. A 3tb portable hard drive can be locked up or taken along while traveling. It helps safeguard important data, when on a shared computer or when children are using them. Any computer with Firewire capability or USB capability detects these portable drives and it can be accessed like any internal hard drive.Whether it is for multimedia storage, imaging or backup, a 3 terrabyte hard drive is the latest buzz, thought the petabyte is probably waiting beyond.
