What determines the maximum size of HDD that an item of hardware can use / recognise?

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tbm

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Mike
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Have spotted on a couple of bits of hardware (namely HDD docks and my new PC) that there's a limit placed on the max size of hard drive they can use.

Not knowing any better this seems odd to me, as I'd have thought they should just recognise and size that's put in there. What's the crack with this? Is it a hardware or software issue? Can it be got around?

In the interests of "future proofing" I really want to install a 2Tb internal drive in my machine, but the specs state max size 1.5Tb.. what is likely to happen if I fitted a 2Tb unit? Would it just not recognise the additional capacity?

Cheers ;)
 
windows (i think just 32 bit off the top of my head) has a limit of 2TB on physical attached drives but you can overcome that by creating the drives as dynamic rather than basic and spanning them.
 
Thanks gents :)

The PC is a Dell Studio XPS 8000, which will shortly be running Windows 7 64bit. Off the top of my head I can't remember what the drive dock was.

So assuming there's no hardware limitation and the OS will recognise 2TB drives, were Dell just taking out of their a*ses with the 1.5Tb limit? It did cross my mind that this was simply the largest avalable drive at the time of launch..

Neil, I shall google spanning :p
 
tbm said:
Neil, I shall google spanning :p
Click to expand...

(very) roughly..

go into disk manager (youll need completely unpartitioned disks), right click on the disk and do new volume. select dynamic from the disk type.

once done for each disk you want to span then right click the first disk in the series and do new volume, run through the wizard and select spanned, then add the other disks to include.

remember to do a quick format, i forgot when i did a 3TB span on a server the other day and ended up leaving it overnight lol
 
Cheers Neil - I've checked the Dell website and can't find any BIOS updates.. which figures since the machines are pretty new.

Thanks for the info on Spanning; hopefully it shouldn't come to that now, however if this PC lasts as well as the last one did I'll probably need it eventually :p
 
Cheers Chaz - AFAIK the motherboard is made by Dell so if there isn't a BIOS update on their website I should be safe...
 
max partition for NTFS is 2tb - however, Windows can reference more if you make a load of 2tb partitions then dynamic them - we have 9tb disks presented to our backup server which are made up of 4x2tb and 1x1tb :P really annoying really !
 
Cheers :)

For the benefit of anyone finding this as a result of a search, I finally bought a WD 2Tb drive and the PC recognises it's full capacity :cool:

I think in this case it was just Dell quoting the max. size of drive available at the time, rather than that actually supported by the hardware / software..
 
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