3TB External Drive and XP

SexbombSexbomb Posts: 20,005
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Going to buy one of these bigger drives and sort my storage out and sell off one or two of my other drives to de clutter, I believe xp doesn't see all the space and something needs to be done on it, will partioning the drive sort it out or do I need a tool to align it?

Will be buying a western digital drive, i'm nearly tempted to buy a 4TB.

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  • plugs13ampplugs13amp Posts: 274
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    4TB - thats an awful lot of data to lose in one go if (when) it fails. You seem to say its for storage, not backup. If it is indeed for storage, you need to buy two, and use the other one as a backup.

    remember; Data that isn't in two places is data that you don't care about.
  • d'@ved'@ve Posts: 45,452
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    Sexbomb wrote: »
    Going to buy one of these bigger drives and sort my storage out and sell off one or two of my other drives to de clutter, I believe xp doesn't see all the space and something needs to be done on it, will partioning the drive sort it out or do I need a tool to align it?

    Will be buying a western digital drive, i'm nearly tempted to buy a 4TB.

    I have done this but have used it as a usb3 backup drive.

    Windows XP will initially see it as anything from 800GB to 2TB and that's all you'll be able to use. Some (maybe all) drive manufacturers produce free utilities to allow it to be properly partitioned but even then there is a maximum partition size of 2TB.

    More than one partition can be created to use up all the disk capacity, but if you replace all your hard drives made by that manufacturer by another manufacturer's drive, the utility may not work so you'll lose access to the data (but it won't be irretrieveably lost).

    Seagate do this so have a read up on it. http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/beyond-2tb/

    WD have something similar I believe but I can only speak for the Seagate version and for that to work, you must have a Seagate or Maxtor Hard Drive somewhere on your system.

    To completely solve the problem, you need to upgrade to Windows Vista, 7 or 8 and have a UEFI BIOS.

    If you use it as an external back-up drive, and only have usb2 on your computer, it is mind-blowingly slow transferring terabytes of data so you need a usb3 card and of course make sure your new drive (or drive caddy) is usb3 - it's around 5 times faster than usb2. Internally you won't have that problem obviously BUT how then are you going to back up all that data? :cool:
  • emptyboxemptybox Posts: 13,917
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    I see Seagate have a tool called DiscWizard for using drives over 2.1TB with XP and 32bit systems.
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/02/seagate_3tb_barracuda_xt/
    It also allows you to use it as the system drive.
    Not sure if Western Digital have something similar.


    Not sure if just partitioning the drive in a compatible system would work?
    Drives over 2TB work best in systems with UEFI BIOS and GPT partitioning tables. XP doesn't support GPT.

    ETA: I see d'@ve got in before me. :D
  • s2ks2k Posts: 7,410
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    Personally I'd stick to a max of 2TB disks on an XP system. The discwizard workakround looks like a total bodge and I'd question its stability.

    As others have pointed out you really want to be thinking about how to back this up since you mention you will be getting rid of the original disks.
  • d'@ved'@ve Posts: 45,452
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    To learn more about the options, have a read of the Seagate manual:

    http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/support-content/downloads/discwizard/_shared/docs/dw_ug.en.14382.pdf

    Start with sections 4.2 to 4.4, it provides some good background information. WD probably have a similar manual somewhere.
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