Looking to buy 3TB HDD - Does my hardware support one?

I didn't know if I should post this in storage or in motherboards so forgive me if I guessed wrong. Anyway I have a BIOSTAR TA870U3+ motherboard and I can't find the information anywhere as to what size HDD it will support. If it won't support a 3TB drive are there PCI-E cards out there that could add the functionality or is it an issue of what BIOS the motherboard supports?

Thanks for any help you guys can provide.

I can't imagine why the motherboard wouldn't support 3TB hdd. Just buy one and plug it in, I bet it will work. If not fix it afterwards.

Because conventional BIOS uses MBR which imposes a limit of 2.2 TB for a disk/partition. I just couldn't find any information online and thought the people who knew more about large HDDs than me might know. And perhaps even know a way to overcome that limitation on a motherboard that is using a conventional BIOS.

The limit only applies if you are booting from the HD

If your not booting from it then the only limit is the OS, which you can work around AFAIK

Thanks for clearing that up. From what I read the articles weren't very clear on it, but they must be assuming that whenever someone buys a HDD they're using it as a boot disk (perhaps appealing to the lowest common denominator in the process as far as hardware enthusiasts go). I don't remember reading anything about IF the drive is bootable, then worry about MBR, ELSE it will work like a normal storage volume. They made it out like the MBR way of initializing the drive will always be a limiting factor. But what you're saying makes sense and I will definitely confirm before I pull the trigger.

Anyway thanks for clearing that up. It was a lot more useful than the "just buy one and deal with getting the wrong product later" mentality. Thanks!

MBR will always be limiting, so use GPT with drives bigger than 2TB . MBR has no problem, it's just not able to accommodate big drives. It's GPT that causes a problem, in that old motherboards with just BIOS (a 30 years old tech) don't know how to boot from a GPT drive.