At the beginning the operating system was installed on the 3TB, while the 8TB was the backup drive. However, the drive was recognized as 2TB only, so I tried to figure out it it's possible to define it correctly as 3TB. How can I tell if the motherboard supports UEFI? Google shows some results when typing "P67A-UD3-B3 UEFI", but I'm not sure. The ideal situation is that both of the drives contain their full sizes, if it's possible, since most the SSD sizes are too small for me, and the big ones (1TB+) are quite expensive. Should I pass on that 1TB, and leave it as 2TB instead of 3TB? Is it an issue of Windows 7 only, or will it be the same with other operating systems (Windows 8 / Windows 10) as well?
Here's your motherboard at Gigabyte site:
GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 1155 - GA-P67A-UD3-B3 (rev. 1.x)
which says:
"Hybrid EFI Technology combines the benefits of GIGABYTE's mature BIOS platform including stability and compatibility with 3rd party products with 3TB+ HDD support from EFI technology, allowing GIGABYTE to offer the best of both worlds through a quick and easy BIOS update using GIGABYTE's @BIOS utility that is freely available from the GIGABYTE website."
It's from 2011. Trying to decipher the marketing gobbledegook, my guess is that it has a BIOS and does not offer UEFI.
Which would mean you can't initialize it as GPT and use it as a boot drive. But I'd think you could use MBR, let it be restricted to 2.2 GB, and use it as a boot drive.
The "3 TB+" support thing is what I referred to in my first post--intended to allow you to see all the drive without going to GPT.
I have
NO repeat NO idea if it works well or is a mess that should be avoided.
If you want to try it, you would go to the "utilities" download area from the above link and download and install the "3 TB Unlock" gizmo.
You may or may not have to also update your BIOS. I dunno.
I don't know if that 3 TB thing would be useful to you for your non-Windows drive. However: your motherboard may or may not support 8 TB drives of any type. You may ultimately be limited by that and be able to see only portions of the 8 or maybe nothing for all I know, even with the 3 TB unlock tool.
I don't know how much data storage you need and I don't know why you bought an 8 TB drive.
Windows needs only 20 GB. Why
specifically would a 128 GB, 256 GB, or 500 GB SSD be "too small"?
Millions of people use SSDs of 128 GB and under. If you in fact have 1 TB of data
as opposed to applications, then obviously it won't fit on a 500 GB SSD, but that's an unusual situation.
My inclination would be to do one of the following:
1: Buy a relatively small SSD and put Windows and applications on it, using MBR or GPT, whichever you want. Use the other drives for data only.
2: Put Windows on the 3 TB drive using MBR and concede the .8 TB it won't allow you to use--rather than get involved with that 3 TB unlock thing. You'd have to decide if that extra .8 TB is worth fiddling with that tool.
You probably paid a pile of dollars for that 8 TB drive, so you need to find out if you can use all 8 TB of it, with the unlock tool, GPT, or whatever else you can come up with. If you can't and it's limited to 2.2 TB, that's a big waste of money on unusable capacity. Is it returnable?
