Quite interesting news this is, after we heard about Seagate offering 3TB drives in their NAS solutions. Rumours has it that Western Digital will also be offering 3TB drives to retail soon, as in very soon.

WD has been struggling to make 3TB and above drives to work with 32-bit version of operating systems, as there has been known compatibility issues surrounding it. Since WD is gearing up for a full scale launch of new 3TB models, we can safely assume that they’ve successfully solved the compatibility issue.

According to Tech Arp who published the unconfirmed information WD is planning a refresh for its three hard drive series: Caviar Black, Caviar Blue and Caviar Green, where all their top models will come with 3TB capacity. There’s no mention of the exact date of the launch, but the source stated sometime in the middle of October, so that’s roughly thus in 2-3 weeks at most.

“But the problems start when you try to use the hard drive as a regular internal drive where limitations in Windows and current hardware will cause problems with hard drive over 2TB storage capacity due to 32-bit addressing, something that can be solved with EFI, the successor to BIOS that supports GUID Partition Table and 64-bit LBA addressing.”

WD is said to have solved these problems through its storage technology 4KB Advanced Format Sector Disk that uses larger storage sectors (4 Kilobyte vs. 512 Byte), but even if most systems should be able to enjoy 3TB hard drives for storage (UEFI is required to boot from a storage unit over 2TB) there are limitations there too.

Microsoft Windows Home Server supports 4KB storage sectors and writes the following on its website for the use of Advanced Format sector disk.

“You will experience performance degradation when using Advanced Format disk in your Home Server v1 for Server Backup, Storage Pool, or System Disk because the disks are formatted and aligned in a way Windows Home Server is not compatible with.”

The good thing is that Microsoft Home Server Vail that is based on Windows Server 2008 R2 will support 4KB sectors, but when it will launch is uncertain. If the information on Tech Arp pans out we will get 3TB hard drives on the market before Vail arrives in stores.

SOURCE via Nordic Hardware