Seagate is selling the drive today for $250. Cables to add new interfaces or support vary from $20 to $50. Internal drives are expected in the future but may wait until more systems can properly boot; using a larger than 2.1TB disk as a boot drive requires EFI firmware that most Windows PCs don’t have.
via Seagate unveils first-ever 3TB external drive | Electronista.
No doubt the internal version known as Constellation is still to be released. And take note EFI or Extensible Firmware Interface is the one thing differentiating Mac desktops from the large mass of Wintel desktops now on the market. Dell, HP, IBM, Acer, Asus, etc. are all wedded still to the old Intel BIOS based motherboard architecture. Mac along adopted EFI and has used it consistently since it first adopted Intel chips for its computer products. Now the necessity of EFI is becoming embarrassingly clear. Especially for the gamer fanboys out there who must have the largest hard drives on the market. Considering the size of these drives it’s amazing to think you could pack 4 of these into a Mac Pro desktop, and get 12TB of storage all internally connected.
Regarding the internals of the drive itself. Some speculation in this article included a suggestion that this hard drive used 4 platters total to reach 3GB of storage. Computing how many GBytes per platter this would require puts the density at 750 Gbytes/platter. This would mark a significant increase over the more common 640Gbytes/platter in currently shipping. In fact in a follow-up to this original announcement yesterday Seagate has announced it is using a total of 5 platters in this external hard drive. Which computes to 600 Gbytes/platter which is more inline with currently shipping single platter drives and even slightly less dense the the 640 GByte drives that are at the top of the storage density scale.
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