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Ultra-high capacity internal hard disks are slowly entering the mainstream, despite their associated hardware limitations. The Barracuda XT, Seagate’s first 3TB disk, doesn’t include a hardware workaround to prepare it for use with older operating systems; instead, a downloadable software utility is available from Seagate’s website. DiscWizard is a straightforward tool that partitions and formats the disk from within Windows, enabling support for 32-bit operating systems including Windows XP, which can’t natively recognise disks with capacity higher than 2.2TB. Much of its functionality is built into Windows 7, so we didn’t need to use it when installing the disk in our test system. One benefit of installing the software is that it can clone an existing disk onto the Barracuda, which should make system upgrades much simpler.
It’s unfortunate that it costs so much more than other 3TB disks, effectively pricing itself out of the competition. Buy the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB instead.
