Windows 7, GPT and 3TB

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Sir_Poop_Alot

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I just received a HITACHI XL Desk 3TB External Hard Drive by UPS today. This external drive's only connection is usb2.0. Most people disassemble the enclosure and take the 3tb out and make it an internal drive. I also did this as this drive inside sports a 7200rpm, 64mb cache, 6.0g/s interface. I'm running into a problem. Windows only can see around 2 TB of space. It got around 750GB of unallocated space that it can allocate. I know GPT can address drive above 2TB and beyond. My questions is have anyone over come this problem and what how did you do it. Please share. Thanks!
 
im not sure what you are asking? you can't overcome the limits of MBR.
if you want 3TB as one partition then use GPT, otherwise partition the drive
 
The drive is already formatted for GPT, but I ran into the same problem as my motherboard will not boot from greater than a 2TB partition, and showed 750gb free space.

This was a Dell Zino HD which can only hold one harddrive (so I ended up just swapping in a 2TB drive from another computer), however, for most other systems even very compact ones I would recommend just getting a little 30GB cheapo SSD drive to boot from, and then use the 3TB drive for storage or infrequently used large applications. The SSD will provide very fast bootups and primary application launches, and even when you need to access the 3TB it should still be faster since it will be 100% dedicated to that task rather than also serving various other windows needs simultaneously.
 
Some disk controllers will not properly see > 2TiB. In that case you are pretty much SoL. You need to buy a disk controller or switch to a 2TB drive. You could try updating to the newest drivers for the SATA controller. I would suggest that if it shows it as 3TB in the BIOS.
 
Windows, or rather the BIOS, will see it as a 3TB drive if you use it as a non-system drive.
You shouldn't boot from such a big HDD anyway, as it's not possible to make a system image backup unless your backup drive is at least as big.
Better get a SSD as a system drive, just big enough to store your OS and program files.
 
I apologize for the unclear post. Let me try to re-explain my situations. Basically I am booting off a 92gb SSD (kingston). I have 2x250GB drives in Raid0, 2x640GB (non-raid) for storage. Recently I just bought a HITACHI XL Desk 3TB External Hard Drive. The external hard drive only comes with a usb 2.0 connection. I read online that most people who got this drive on sale for $79.99 strip the actual hard drive out of the enclosure and put it into their computer as a data drive to take advantage of it's 7200rpm, 64mb cache and 6.0g/s interface. I have also done this, but windows (or bios) does not see the complete drive as it is 3.0TB. I read online the OS (windows) can only read and access up to 2.12TB hard drive. I was wondering if there's a way to over come this. I read that GUID Partition Table (GPT) can access the entire drive. I have a ASUS p8p67 Pro with bios 1502 and Windows 7. I was wondering if updating the BIOS and load any particular Windows 7 drivers can fix this so that I can access all 3TB (even if make into separate partitions).
 
You just need to go into disk management and make your disk GPT, you have new hardware and Win7 so all is good. Is the drive on the Intel controller ?
 
I just checked and my drive is on the Marvell controller. I already tried formating the disk to GPT but disk management doesn't give me any other choice but NTFS.
 
GPT vs MBR has nothing to do with NTFS, or formatting. The difference is the partition table, to make a disk GPT in windows you click on the actual disk (far left) and choose "Initialize Disk", then you should get the option to choose between GPT and MBR. After that you can format the partition(s) with whatever file system (NTFS, FAT32, etc) that you require.

Also, I would put the disk on the Intel controller if possible, they tend to perform better than the Marvell chips.
 
I have a Marvell chip on my X58 mobo and it has a >2.2TB mode that you can activate in the BIOS (I think it's the marvell, but there is also a jmicron for two eSATA ports so it's confusing, and I don't have a 3TB drive yet), maybe yours is disabled.

+ what dustNbone said.
 
Make sure you have the latest version of Rapid Storage Technology installed. Assuming you're using the Intel ports. 10.5 and 10.6 are good. Stay away from 10.1 it is known for causing issues with 3TB. Versions older than that don't support 3TB.
 
I was a little confuse about the "Initialize Disk" option suggested by dustNbone... but after thinking about what he wrote... I went into "Disk Management" in administrative tools and right click on "disk" icon and right click... there's an option that says "Convert to GPT disk". That's the option that I was looking for all this time. Once I click that the entire disk was available to me to format to NTFS. It works! Thanks to dustNbone and everyone for their suggestions and help. I appreciate! :)

dustNbone said:
GPT vs MBR has nothing to do with NTFS, or formatting. The difference is the partition table, to make a disk GPT in windows you click on the actual disk (far left) and choose "Initialize Disk", then you should get the option to choose between GPT and MBR. After that you can format the partition(s) with whatever file system (NTFS, FAT32, etc) that you require.

Also, I would put the disk on the Intel controller if possible, they tend to perform better than the Marvell chips.
Click to expand...
 
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