3TB drives are now starting to appear at attractive price points for consumers and small businesses.  However there are some issues that may be faced when putting these drives into older systems.

The issue is that some older PC BIOS’s and some operating systems (most notably Windows) may not be able to address the entire 3TB of space in the drive.  Without going into a lesson in memory address issues, (I see your eyes glazing over already!) if you want to have a 3TB drive as a boot drive you have to have both a motherboard with the BIOS to support it as well as a 64 bit operating system. For most folks this means Windows 7 64bit.  Mac and Linux users have no problem using a 3TB as a boot volume as long as the BIOS supports it.

For a much more through discussion of these checkout the article at ITBusiness.ca  They close the article by saying at the present time it’s probably better off to buy 2 2TB drives. I have to agree.