Windows 7: WinXP - max hard drive size?

Please excuse the WinXP question - I didn't see a link to an 'XP' forum at the bottom of this site; so, I figured I'd post here real quick.

Google results give conflicting answers. Can anyone tell me what max hard drive size WinXP Professional 32-bit will recognize?

I plan to connect an external drive via USB to an old laptop.



Thank you, as always, folks.

Assuming you are using SP3 I believe the limit is 2TB, this is only the limit for a drive you wish to boot from as SP3 supports Dynamic disks and you can go higher than that using this method.

Thank you, Sub! I should be fine with 1TB or less, then. Cool.

yes I've had 2x500GB (1TB) RAID0 booting and operating great in XP SP3

Cool. I figured I'd hear from someone with experience. Much appreciated.

Actually, as far as I know, that 2TB limit is only implied if you have a cluster and sector size of 512 bytes (has to do with the MBR). With those new drives that has a sector size of 4096, then the limit should increase to 16TB.

Of course, there are always workarounds such as GPT and RAID...

Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows Storage - Ask the Core Team - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Thank you, arkhi!