Hitachi&39's chart of requirements for operating system to support 3TB hard drives.

Only a few companies have storage solutions based on 3TB internal hard drives: Seagate's BlackArmor NAS server' Western Digital's Caviar Green' and now it's Hitachi's turn. '

The new 3TB hard drive from Hitachi.

The company announced today its new lineup of 3TB storage solutions for both general users and OEMs. The first is the Hitachi Deskstar internal hard-drive kit, which is similar to that of WD's Caviar Green. The kit includes a 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 hard drive, mounting screws, step-by-step instructions, and software that allows 32- and 64-bit operating systems to take advantage of the full 3TB of storage.

The reason the software is necessary is because most computers are limited by the legacy motherboard and file system standards and therefore can handle hard drives of 2.19TB or less.

Note, however, that the software allows for computers with BIOS-based motherboards to use 3TB hard drives only as secondary hard drives. Only computers with the new EFI-based motherboards are able to use a 3TB, or larger, hard drive as its main (boot) hard drive.

The new 3TB Deskstar 7k3000 is available now and slated to cost $250. It's also available in a 2TB version. Both versions comes with 64MB of cache memory, spin at 7,200rpm, and support the latest 6Gbps SATA interface. These drives are available for both general consumers and Hitachi's OEM partners. For the latter, the drive also comes with a 1.5TB version.

The company's second 3TB solution is the Hitachi XL desktop external hard drive, which, unfortunately, supports only USB 2.0 connectivity. The drive is slated to cost $250. It also comes with 2TB and 1TB versions, costing $70 and $100, respectively.