Why did they complicate buying a hard drive?

B

BoogerBomb

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jan 10, 2003
Messages
6,470
I have started storing blurays on my system. 1TB fills ups pretty damned quick. I figure ok I can afford the $140 WD Caviar Green 3TB drive. Then I started reading about size limitations and such. Boy am I way behind the times. They added all this UEFI and GPT crap that mucks everything up for me. Nowadays I feel like an illiterate old fart at 37 when I use to be on top of all this stuff.

This drive wont be intended as a boot drive only to store copies of my movies.

I have a Gigabyte mobo that has the AMD 790gx chipset with SB750 and run Win 7 64 bit. Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H.

Do I have to get a whole new motherboard now?
 
I think you shouldn't have any problems as a secondary drive. The reason you have to go to GPT is because MBR with 512-byte sectors runs out at 2 terrabytes (power of 2 terrabytes), and software support for non-512-byte sectors is iffy, so drive manufactures have gone with 'report as 512-byte, but actually be larger' with all the complications that involves.

If windows doesn't see the full space, make sure you have latest drivers for your sata card.
 
Once you do not need to boot from the 3TB and format it as GPT (ie not MBR) it should work perfectly fine as a DATA only drive and accessible on that 790GX.

I have much much older chipsets both AMD & INTEL that detect and allow me the full 3TB as a single partition.

So basically attach drive. Boot into OS (Win 7 or later). Go to Disk Management.


FROM MICROSOFT:

You can use the following methods to create GPT disks:

In the Disk Management console, right-click the MBR drive you want to convert to GPT and then click Convert to GPT Disk. If the drive is not empty or contains partitions, this option is unavailable.

In the DISKPART utility, select the drive you want to convert and enter the following command: CONVERT GPT

For raw disks, you can use two additional methods:

After you install a new raw disk, open the Disk Management console to start a wizard that you can use to configure the new disk. The wizard includes options to initialize the disk as MBR or GPT.

Initialize the new disk later by using the Initialize Disk option in the Disk Management console.



And yes drivers are important. Depending on chipset it could mean the difference between detecting or not. You could always install AMD latest chipset drivers:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/raid_windows.aspx
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top