Windows 7 PCs Can Make Drives over 2.2 TB Attached through eSATA .....

[JMH]

Windows 7 PCs Can Make Drives over 2.2 TB Attached through eSATA Appear Smaller


Windows 7 customers that connect a drive larger than 2.2 Terabytes through an eSATA port can experience some issues, Microsoft has warned.

It appears that the size of the drive will be reported as smaller to the actual space available to on the disk, the Redmond company noted, explaining that it’s not the fault of Windows 7, or that of Windows Vista, which can also experience similar problems.

But in addition to the size of the disk being reported incorrectly, there are additional issues.

“The disk may appear as the expected size if the drive is previously formatted using a different eSATA controller, USB, or 1394. In this scenario some read or write attempts may fail,” the software giant said.

In fact, the source of the problem according to Microsoft, is the way in which the controller driver reports the total number of sectors on the disk that is connected to the machine.

Effectively users will come across this issue in scenarios in which the number of sectors is underreported.

“Drives with more than 32-bits worth of sectors are reported using 32-bits, causing an artificially low disk size to be computed,” Microsoft explained.

More -
Windows 7 PCs Can Make Drives over 2.2 TB Attached through eSATA Appear Smaller - Softpedia

 

[Hondajt]

so could this also apply to smaller sizes that have 32-bits worth of sectors?

 

[karlsnooks]

Generally, you can get rid of all problems by simply partitioning that monster drive such that all partitions are less than 2 TB.

There is a MS knowledge base article on the problem. I'll see if I can find it easily.

 

[karlsnooks]

so could this also apply to smaller sizes that have 32-bits worth of sectors?

No.

 

[karlsnooks]

And here is the link to the MS article:

Drives larger than 2.2 TB may appear incorrectly when attached to an eSATA port