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3TB hard drive help

P

pojut

Gawd
Joined
Dec 28, 2009
Messages
541
Hey all, I've been reading around on various places, and I've found conflicting information. I'd trust you folks over anyone else, so I come to you in the hopes of finding a common answer. Can someone give me a quick paragraph crash course on why certain motherboards don't work/can't boot/whatever it is with 3TB hard drives, and how to tell if my own motherboard is one of them? While a detailed and technical explanation would be awesome, the Reader's Digest version is perfectly fine.

I've found information that doesn't match up...some places say it only matters if it's a boot drive, some say it only matters depending on the brand, some say it's the BIOS, some say it's the SATA controller, etc. If you could help me out here, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you!
 
The controller BIOS - old fashioned 16-bit BIOS can only support up to 2.2TB storage drives. EFI has removed that restriction and thus any EFI motherboard (Intel Macs, Intel server motherboards (?) as well as Sandy Bridge motherboards) will be able to support much larger storage drives.

Note that this is commonly an issue with booting off such a HDD. If you don't need to boot from it, it'll probably work fine on a regular ol' BIOS.
 
The controller BIOS - old fashioned 16-bit BIOS can only support up to 2.2TB storage drives
Click to expand...
Yep!

I use a 3TB drive for storage on my Asus P6T but I run W7 64bit which can "see" the entire 3TB as a single volume.

I use SSDs for OS drives and wouldn't consider booting from one of those monster drives. :)
 
Your motherboard - Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H probably will support the 3TB and higher HDs as a non-bootable device. However you did not mention the OS you use and this is important factor in the 3TB compatibility. You may have a problems under XP and XP-64bit.

Since you have Gigabyte I believe they have some utility that in the worst case will allow to use the entire 3TB disk - http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainbo...nlocks_3TB_Hard_Drives_on_32_Bit_Systems.html

I personally am using two 3TB disks in a similar AMD 7xx based system but under Linux.
 
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