My Google Reader is packed with feeds about Seagate confirming the arrival of a 3TB drive sometime later this year.
My question is really how surprising is this? Don’t get me wrong… each capacity jump is a milestone, and capacity hungry consumers and businesses crave more, but is the market ready? It’s incumbant upon the hard drive manufacturers and their ecosystem partners to ensure customers can take advantage of such capacity out of the gate, and rest assured, Seagate is leading this discussion…whitepaper forthcoming.
There are two large issues at hand: 4K Sector readiness, and the looming 2.1TB limitation that goes along with 512K addressing. This limitation looms large on the desktop side, and enterprise storage is not immune. For more on this check out Dave Burks post on 4K, and Barbara Craig’s post on the 2.1TB limitation.
Sorry Windows XP users…but there’s hope for Windows 7 and Mac Snow Leopard.
The story no one is talking about is what may be happening on the 2.5-inch drive front. If 3.5-inch drives are growing from 2TB to 3TB, what does this mean for the 2.5-inch market? The rumor mill suggests we will see 1TB 2.5-inch enterprise drives as well. This is a key milestone for the 2.5-inch enterprise market, and perhaps drive more customers to make that transition to a lower power, smaller footprint solution…and no 4K or 2.1TB limitations here.
Not to mention whatever this mystery product Seagate is releasing next Monday. Sometimes the sub-plot can be a lot more exciting, so remember to read between the lines.
What are you reading?
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