How Seagate blew past the 2.1TB barrier imposed by both PC hardware and Windows.
Anandtech has a great article today
reviewing Seagate's new 3TB hard drive, which looks at how Seagate got past the 2.1TB barrier imposed both by traditional PC BIOSes and current operating systems.
The long and short of it: the hard drive is available as external-only for now, because current PCs wouldn't be able to interface directly with a 3TB hard drive via SATA due to its Long-LBA addressing system, which BIOSes simply can't work with.
Interestingly, Macs with their EFI firmware and GPT disk partitioning system are able to handle the naked drive fine -- but obviously, Seagate thinks Macs alone are too small of a market to justify releasing the drive in a naked state just yet.
Anandtech did notice much better drive performance when using USB 3.0 rather than standard old 2.0, which gives Seagate's GoFlex system a bit of credibility in this case -- once you've got a USB 3.0 capable computer, you can simply buy the USB 3.0 connector for the drive and snap it on.
However, Anand also noted a possible heat issue with the drive that's worth considering before you buy it.
Check out their full review
here.