My New Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive

Has my usual window shopping trip to Low Yat Plaza. I was surveying for 3TB Western Digital Red hard drive to replace the 2x1TB hard drive that I current have in my DNS-323 NAS.

It’s quite pricey (RM499 each), where I need to get 2 since I have RAID 1 set up in my NAS.

I currently have 4 hard drives in my home PC

• 240GB Kingston SSD for system
• 320GB Seagate hard drive for storing Users folder
• 1TB Samsung hard drive for storing files
• 500GB Seagate hard drive for storing files

I also seems to fill up 2 of my 1TB hard drives with downloaded HD movies. Then I do something crazy. I’m getting a new 3TB hard drive to replace the 1TB and 500GB hard drives that I use to store data on my PC, and will use that to store HD movies that I downloaded for my WDTV Live Hub.

Upon taking out the hard drive out of the anti-static plastic wrap, there an important message there to visit http://www.seagate.com/beyond-2TB website.

I learned something new today. It seems that 3TB hard disk drive has break the barrier of maximum 2.1TB hard disk drive that legacy system has. To use 3TB hard disk as a boot disk, your computer needs to use the UEFI BIOS.

The 3TB hard disk still can be used as boot drive on a legacy bios, but only 2.2TB space is available, and you will be wasting almost 1TB of space, which seems no point of getting 3TB hard disk.

Luckily, I will only use this for data drive (since I already have SSD for boot drive), so I’m not affected by this (my PC is using legacy BIOS and not UEFI BIOS).

The next thing I learn is that, when initialising this disk on Windows 8, you need to use GPT (GUID Partition Table) scheme. This is selected by default instead on MBR. Then I wonder, what’s the different between the two.

Just for experiment, I initialise the disk using MBR scheme. What happened is, only 2.2TB space is initialised, where the other 800GB cannot be initialised as the option is greyed out.