formatting 3 TB drive

K

kilobyte

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 20, 2005
Messages
186
So I know this is a little noobish questions but this is the first time I have ever messed with a drive over 500GB. From the reading that I have done it seems in order to use a 3TB drive installed on a windows pc I would have to format it in to at least 2 partitions for windows to be able to read it. Now my main question is this if I was to buy a NAS box from Newegg (Synology DS413) and install some 3TB drives would I run in to the same issue of having to create multiple partitions? I was not sure since the drives would not be installed on the windows computer and rather just accessed though the network if I would have the same issues. I really was hoping to use the synology box to hold all my backed up DVDs and really did not want to create unwanted partitions if possible.

Details
1 32in Samsung LCD TV (connected to notebook via HDMI)
1 Win7 notebook acting as media receiver/dvd player
1 Synology box with 4 3TB drives in raid 5
 
If you have a version of Windows above 32bit XP you can have partitions above 2TB. GPT - might be the name. (There are some issues with boot drives.)

Some 3TB hard drives come with drivers that will allow 3TB partitions in 32bit XP.
 
Thank you very much for the info, and since the hard drives in question are not going to be installed on my pc or used to boot off it sounds like i should be good.
 
Like George explained, in windows 7, you will need to initialize disks as GPT instead of the older MBR to create one 3TB partition. GPT is newer but MBR is better for boot drives(drives having windows) because of some compatibility issues. In a network environment, drives get identified by the server....Clients only access them and use their capacity or at least that's how I understands it.
 
Yea i do understand that i just was not sure if the computer would see the network drives or read them because they would be over the 2TB limit was my fear.
 
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