Seagate delivered on its promise to launch a 3 TB external hard drive this year, becoming the first company to do so.
The FreeAgent GoFlex is available directly from Seagate for $250 -- $60 more than Seagate's existing 2 TB drive. The HDD works interchangeably between PC and Mac, and supports USB 2.0 by default (more on that below).
Hitting the 3 TB mark wasn't easy. As PC World explains, legacy operating systems such as Windows XP have trouble with HDDs greater than 2.2 TB, due to an arbitrary limit these platforms set on the drives' master boot record partition tables, contained in the first sector of any HDD. This led to concerns that Seagate's drive wouldn't support 32-bit operating systems.
But here's the trick: The industry is moving to an advanced type of hard drive that uses larger sectors of data -- 4 KB compared to the old 512 bytes -- thus improving density. Legacy operating systems such as Windows XP have trouble recognizing the new format on their own, but Seagate has developed a hardware solution called SmartAlign, which automatically corrects for any misalignment that occurs when advanced format drives on legacy operating systems. My understanding is that Seagate's 3 TB drive fools old operating systems into thinking they're storing less than they actually are, thus getting around the limitations of master boot record partition tables.
Anyway, enough of that tech jargon. Storage capacity aside, there's one other notable feature to this drive: The default USB 2.0 jack can be swapped with either a Firewire/USB 2.0 connector ($50) or USB 3.0 ($40). There's also a USB 3.0 kit that includes the connector, a PCI-Express card and a cable, so you can enjoy the faster connection without a USB 3.0-enabled motherboard. Because what's the point of having 3 TB hard drive if it takes forever to transfer data?
