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Seagate foresees that most PC computers won't recognize the drive with its maximum amount of storage.
This is because 32-bit Windows operating systems generally support only the legacy
Master Boot Record (MBR), which has the cap partition size of 2.19TB, to manage the hard drive. This means, the system won't see more than 2.19TB of storage, regardless of how much larger the hard drive's actual capacity is.
On top of that, all Windows computers that use the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS)-based motherboards, which are the majority of computers on the market, can't boot from a hard drive that's larger that 2.19TB, either, due to the limitation of BIOS protocols. These protocols were defined back in the 1980s and are used to load the operating system from the hard drive into system memory, hence facilitating the booting process.
In the near future, possibly by the end of next year, MBR will be completely replaced by
GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is supported by both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and the BIOS will be replaced by the new
Extensive Firmware Interface (EFI). Then and only then, Windows users will no longer need to worry about hitting the barrier in the storage space for hopefully many, many years to come.
In the meantime, however, Western Digital has a quick solution for consumers to immediately take advantage of its new ultra high-capacity hard drives. The company bundles the new WD Caviar Green 2.5TB and 3TB hard drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), in the form of a PCI Express add-in card.
At its core, this card is an SATA storage controller that, apart from support SATA hard drives, enables the operating system to use proper software driver to correctly support large capacity drives. This allows computers that run Windows 7 and Vista, both 64-bit and 32-bit, to use the new hard drives, at their full capacity, as secondary drives, as long as they are formatted using GPT. Windows XP is still out of the game as it only support MBR.