Hard Drive Capacity

[bigmck]

I am remembering from a few years ago that if you got a HD over 1 TB there was some extra stuff to do because something would not read the drive. I never worried about this before because I could never afford a 1 TB drive. They are extra cheap now. Can I just buy one of the TB drives and not worry about anything and install it? Thanks, == PS I haven't been here is a few moons and just wanted to say Hi to my old buddies.

 

[iko22]

Hey Bigmck - you about ready to buy a Terabyte disk drive? The good news is, you should not have a problem formatting and using the 1TB disk as a NTFS MBR partition.

The problem I think you are refering to, exists at and beyond 2TB. To get beyond 2GB, the disk must be formatted as a GPT partition.

This anomaly exists because MBR partition tables have a 32 bit address space, while the GPT partition tables can use a 64 bit address space.

Windows XP cant handle GPT formatted disks, but Windows Vista, 7, and beyond can access this format.
If you want to use a GPT partitioned disk as a boot drive, then the motherboard must also support UEFI firmware.

Hope that helps.

 

[Megahertz07]

Just to add what Iko22 mentioned.
Below 2 TB you can have a Legacy - MBR drive (boot able or not)
Above 2 TB you must initialize it as a UEFI - GPT. For data you can have Win 32 or 64 bits. To boot from a UEFI - GPT disk you must have a UEFI BIOS and use Win 64 bits.

2TB = 2,199,023,255,040 bytes

 

[bigmck]

OK, thanks very much to both of you. What peaked my interest was I saw a 2 TB SSD for $54 at Newegg. They are cheap now. == Now you have to listen to one of my stories. -- In the mid 1990's the HD were extra expensive. A HD was normally more than one dollar per Megabyte, Mega not Giga. The first one I saw that was less was a 250 MEGABYTE HD for $240. Less than one dollar per Megabyte was a big deal.

 

[Megahertz07]

2 TB SSD for $54 at Newegg ?????? Must be an error.

 

[TechSeven]

:roflmao:

 

[LMiller7]

In the 1980's IBM was selling 10 MB drives for use with the IBM PC for about 1000$ US. That was a lot of storage back then, the equivalent of many floppy disks.

 

[strollin]

In 1985, I purchased a Seagate ST-225 20MB HDD to add to my IBM PC for only $500!

 

[bigmck]

2 TB SSD for $54 at Newegg ?????? Must be an error.

The only error was on my part, it wasn't an SSD but a spinner. I decided to just go with a 240 GB SSD. I don't add that many things these days so a big one is not needed. It is on my desk now to put in soon. Well, not too soon. I have to mow the yard this morning.