External hard drives have traditionally trailed internals ones in their capacities, but Seagate has well and truly flipped that notion by announcing the world’s first 3-terabyte external desktop drive.
Drives have reached such unimagined capacities that it now makes sense to put a tera-drive outside a computer rather than inside, due to PC software being unable to recognise the extra space available.
A 3Tb drive (3,000 gigabytes) as a boot drive for your computer is still a non-starter. Motherboards and their BIOS software, which start up computers and read hard drives, can only handle drives up to 2.1Tb.
Seagate says no one ever thought a 3Tb drive was possible when standards were set back in 1980.
The balance of content size to application size has also shifted dramatically. A digitised HD movie takes up far more space than a software program, so boot drives ought to be smaller than external ones. We like to move our content around and share it and larger external drives and network-attached storage (NAS) make this easy to do.
The average household will store around 900Gb in digital media by 2014, according to a Parks Associates report, driven by video downloads and increasing use of DVRs.
Seagate says the 3Tb GoFlex Desk drive can store up to 120 HD movies, 1,500 video games, thousands of photos and many hours of music.
It has a standard USB 2.0 interface that can be upgraded to 3.0 or FireWire 800 and is available immediately at a suggested price of $250.
