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Right now I'm under a crisis... a free space crisis since almost all my HDD is completely full. And why it have to be now when HDD prices soaring up (because of Thailand's flood, yes, I know).

So rather than buying a $100 1TB HDD, I prefer a $200 3TB, far cheaper in term of price to MB ratio. The problem is that, I don't know if my laptop could detect HDD this big. I use SATA-USB cable so it treats the HDD like UFD (USB Flashdisk). It have no problem with 1TB HDD, but I heard that all BIOS-based computer couldn't detect anything more than 2TB storage. Anyone could shed some light about this?

And while we're talking about HDD. Why is US HDD market price also soared? I thought US market get their HDD from somewhere else, not Thailand too... And why Seagate HDD price also sky rocketed like others? I heard their factory isn't affected by the flood? Damn leechers...

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About the rise in price - it isn't about where your factories are, it isn't about being directly affected by the flood : it's a simple balance of demand and offer. If there's less total production, each remaining element is more desirable, and thus more pricy (plus, as there was a shortage panic, demand rose too, thus price++).

About the price ratio - I guess you're right - if you have the treasury for it, you should always get the highest volume, they usually have a better To/$ ratio. I just purchased a Western Digital 2To at 129€, which makes it about 180$, 90$/To (I guess you shouldn't complain about US HDDs being overpriced...). Though the price does include warranty (3 years for me. Yours?)

About the size restriction : Wasn't it a question of architecture - that 32bit systems couldn't handle enough addresses ? (Scratch that, it was a RAM issue.) It's a both a FileSystem and a BIOS issue : FAT32, that powered the Windows systems up to NT (not included), used 32 bits for sector number, meaning there could be 2^32 sectors, so (2^32)*512 bytes, thus 2To. Since NT, Windows' systems have used NTFS, which can handle up to 16 To (and theorically up to 16 Eo).

But you're right, there is also the issue of the BIOS : the Bios uses the Master boot record (MBR) which handles the partitioning of the disks, couldn't affect to a disk partition a size higher than 2To. The current standard, GUID, resolves that problem, and has a legacy layer to be used with older systems.

As far as I can tell, the 'worst' that could happen is either

1. The disk's partition isn't recognized
2. The disk's partition is cut off at 2 To

And both issues could be handled by manually partitioning the disk (using of course a different computer) into partitions of <2To.

From what I've seen, most legacy issues have been though of, but you should ask a local hardware professional - your vendor, perhaps, if they have sellpoints/showrooms ?

I see... thank you for the answer.

Actually I prefer 1TB HDD but seeing how its price is increased to almost 200%, I'm really interested with 3TD HDD which currently have the best size-to-price ratio. My reason is that: I think even when 1TB HDD still costs about $55 (about the cheapest you can get before Thailand flood), 3TB HDD (which still haven't around at that time) should costs more than $160, since 2TB HDD costs about $110-$120 at that time, if I'm not mistaken. So being priced at $180-$200 is surprisingly cheap at times like this. It's as if there's almost no price increase when compared with 500GB and 1TB counterpart. Well, that's the reason I want to buy 3TB HDD. Is there something wrong with my reasoning? (Btw, if it's right, I wonder why 3TB HDD could be that cheap?)

Now that I'm willing to "invest" that amount of money, the only problem is whether my laptop could read the HDD properly or not.

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The cost of some technology is in the initial upfront hardware cost - scaling the hardware up in power doesn't cost much more after the initial production cost of the materials. In other words, the case, power, laser, needle, circuit boards, etc. may all cost a certain amount of money regardless of storage size, so that for bigger models like 2 and 3TB drives, all they have to do is pay for a larger magnetic disc.

Most memory devices I know of can be still be accessed even if the computer OS or bios can't read all the storage. Instead you should still have access to say, 2TB of the 3TB HDD. Your computer will only see it as a 2TB HDD and act accordingly. I've done this successfully with RAM sticks, but I don't know if it would cause errors doing the same with a HDD - you might get weird overwrite and memory address errors.

Why not find a friend or a store that is willing to let you bring your laptop in and try plugging it to a 3TB HDD and see if it works or not before your make a purchase?

That's what I'm going to do later this evening. Though 3TB is still pretty rare here, so finding store that use it (or have it formatted) is quite hard, let alone friends who actually use it (not to mention I don't have too many off-line friends, tohohoho T^T )

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If you can lay hands on such a drive, and your machine is new enough to be able to accept Windows Vista or better, you shouldn't have a problem.

Older machines may need a BIOS Flash to adapt. My laptop is having no problems with the 3TB drive I have to hand.

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Just to let you know, I've seen Seagate 3TB externals in the UK for under £100 (around $150).
My expierence with them is great, although for a while I was horrified by the click of death, which turned out to be the click of nothing, and eventually went away.

Click of what o_O That scares me T__T

All my HDD is Seagate and they never disappoint me. That's why I always go for Seagate when talking about HDD. Sandisk for SDC. Transcend for UFD.

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The only issue about 3To HDD is that if the HDD crash, you just lose 3To of data...

The countermeasure would be to make a raid 1+5, to create a clone of your HDD on another hdd in a safe area and a cloud storage server but the more data you want to backup, the more it cost.