IS this Motherboard compatible with 3tb drives.

[Jonesie85]

Hello all, how are you?

Anyway, i have this rather old but reliable Motherboard.

GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket AM2 - GA-MA69VM-S2 (rev. 1.0)

I know that it wont pick up a full 3tb HDD. but would it recognise it all in partitions?

eg: 3 Partitions of 1TB each. or 2 partitions of 1.5 tb.

Thank you for your help.

 

[Dwarf]

My guess (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) is that, although the OS is capable of recognising large capacity drives, it will only recognise up to the maximum size that the BIOS can deal with.

There are three main ways round this issue. Firstly, don't use drives that are larger than can be recognised by the BIOS. Secondly, use an interface card that is capable of recognising the full disk capacity. Thirdly (and the most risky) is to see if there is a BIOS update from the motherboard manufacturer that addresses this issue.

 

[Jonesie85]

My guess (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) is that, although the OS is capable of recognising large capacity drives, it will only recognise up to the maximum size that the BIOS can deal with.

There are three main ways round this issue. Firstly, don't use drives that are larger than can be recognised by the BIOS. Secondly, use an interface card that is capable of recognising the full disk capacity. Thirdly (and the most risky) is to see if there is a BIOS update from the motherboard manufacturer that addresses this issue.

do i need something special to use a 2TB drive instead?

 

[bobkn]

Hello all, how are you?

Anyway, i have this rather old but reliable Motherboard.

GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket AM2 - GA-MA69VM-S2 (rev. 1.0)

I know that it wont pick up a full 3tb HDD. but would it recognise it all in partitions?

eg: 3 Partitions of 1TB each. or 2 partitions of 1.5 tb.

Thank you for your help.

This is outside of my personal experience, but:

drives larger than 2TB must use a GPT:

GUID Partition Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If the GPT drive is to be the OS drive, you'd need Windows 7 X64, and the motherboard would also need to use UEFI rather than a traditional BIOS. (Some motherboards appear to use a hybrid BIOS: it looks like a traditional BIOS, but it supports some of the UEFI features, including booting from a GPT drive.)

I don't know whether there's a motherboard BIOS limitation that affects its ability to recognize large drives. I hope not.