Western Digital claims its newly-announced 2.5 TB as well as 3 TB Caviar Green tough drives are a largest capacity SATA drives upon a marketplace. But WD admits which these bigger drives need the little bit of help operative upon comparison systems.

“Drives with capacities in additional of 2.19 TB currently benefaction barriers for PC hardware, firmware as well as program,” according to WD’s press recover. To get around these barriers, WD is bundling the brand-new drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), that will pair bequest handling systems with a driver than can await bigger drives.

The 2.19 TB extent isn’t the complaint for 64-bit versions of Windows 7 or Vista, OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, or most versions of Linux. Really, a complaint is Windows XP.

XP (whether in 32- or 64-bit) runs into problems since of its bequest BIOS and Master Boot Record (MBR) partition list, that it in spin carried over from progressing versions of Windows. These concede XP to residence a maximum usually 2^32 judicious blocks during 512 bytes any — for an upper firm of 2.19 TB.

Any 32-bit complement (even a single as brand-new as Windows 7) has trouble booting into the drive with the genius over 2.19 TB, but they can work around which limitation for a delegate inner drive. XP can usually make use of these vast drives as outmost drives with special USB firmware which possibly presents it as the single drive regulating incomparable sector sizes or as more than a single not as big drives to the horde (this is how Seagate’s 3 TB outmost drive functions — or regulating an inner HBA label, which does fundamentally a same thing.

Still confused? WD has the finish list of handling systems, motherboards as well as USB bridges which it supports for the brand-new large-capacity drives. Meanwhile, if you’re ready to hurl as well as a old 2TB drives only weren’t sufficient storage, a new drives have been accessible right away. The 2.5 TB is $189 and the 3 TB tough drive is $239.00.