What is 3TB Disk
Table of Contents
| 1. What is 3TB Disk? 2. The Format of 3TB Disk 3. The Brands of 3TB Disk |
What is 3TB Disk?
In order to store more pictures, videos, music, documents and other files, we always hope hard disk capacity grow over time. Now hard disk capacity has jumped from 2TB to 3TB. If you have a 3 TB disk, it means that the capacity of your disk is up to 3072 GB. But as a matter of fact many 3 TB disk in the market only has 3000GB. Besides, the 3 TB disks may have some problems in older computers. As known to all, disk capacity less than 2 .2 TB is often adopted with MBR partition table. However, the MBR partition table is unable to supports for the disk whose capacity is more than 2.2 TB. In another word, MBR partition table doesn’t support 3TB disk. Then what is the format of 3TB disk? Keep reading and learn more about 3TB disks.
The Format of 3TB Disk
As you may know PC operating system before 2011 was adopted with PC BION, whose feature is using MBR partition tables. MBR uses 31 bits for storing logical block addresses. MBR partition tables only support a maximum of 2.2 TB. Then how does 3TB disk work? Here you should know another partition tables - GPT, namely GUID Partition Tables, allocates 64 bits for logical block addresses and therefore allows a maximum disk and partition size of 264 sectors and it allows up to a maximum of 18EB（1EB=106TB. Therefore, GPT has broken through the limitation of MBR which only supports for 2.2 TB. UEFI, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is new BIOS that not only supports for MBR partition tables but also supports for GPT partition tables. Therefore, if you want to use a 3TB disk you must use UEFI BIOS and GPT. Generally speaking, Windows XP only supports MBR partition table, so it doesn’t support 3 TB disk. Windows7 and Vista supports both MBR and GPT partition tables. Therefore if you choose GPT partition table it can recognize the 3 TB disk, if you choose MBR partition table it can’t recognize the 3 TB disk.
The Brands of 3TB Disk
Since the 3 TB disk was developed by Seagate Corporation, there have been many brands of 3TB disk online or in the market. Some popular disk manufacturers include Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba, Maxtor, Samsung, Maxell, Imation, Transcend, LaCie, G-Technology, Buffalo Technology , Apricorn, Buslink, Fantom and more. Most of those 3TB disks have a good performance when reading or storing whether large files or small files and folders.
Resources Related with 3TB Disk
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References
Everything you need to know about 3TB disk from PCWorld
How to convert fat fat32 to ntfs
3TB disk partition and unallocated space