Western Digital ships world's highest capacity SATA hard drive

Western Digital announced on Tuesday it's been shipping the industry's first serial ATA (SATA) 3TB internal hard drive for about a week. The new drive passes the previous 2.19TB ceiling due to 4-kilobyte sector sizes.

The new offering, part of WD's Caviar Green family of SATA hard drives, is available in 2.5TB and 3TB capacities utilizing 750GB platters and Advanced Format technology. Advanced Format refers to any drive using sector sizes that are larger than the traditional size of 512 bytes.

The new drive's 4K sectors allow more bits to be packed onto the surface of the platter.

The industry has been moving toward using 4K drive sectors for more than a decade as advances like perpendicular recording technology allowed hard disk drive capacities to double around every year or so.

:story: Full story: Computerworld