johnnymk

A friend of mine bought two 1.5 TB SATA hard drives and installed them into a 2 bay case. He wondered why XP only recognized 2 TB total space.

He has discovered that XP64 is required to recognize the larger hard drive space. Anyone ever hear of this limitation?

DarkFury

Yup.. that's why if you want to RAID drives, you only buy 2 1TB drives and not 2 1.5TB drives.

But here's my question... if the two 1.5 drives were installed as separate drive letters, are you saying that Windows XP can't see both of them independently as 1.5 TB drives with different letters?

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gwilks98

it's a limit based off 32 bit os's. upgrade to a 64 bit and the problem goes away.

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Thesifer

I thought it would "Recognize it" but you had to partition it off ? Am I wrong? It's been years since I've dealt with it.

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Maarchk

raid or no raid Johnny?

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johnnymk

no RAID

DarkFury

That's weird if his system can't see them both in a non RAID setup.

I thought the limitation was per volume (mostly to your boot drive as the primary drive), not the total space of all drives in the system.

Maarchk

http://www.carltonbale.com/2007/05/h...-system-limit/

This says only raid has the problem. or a single hard drive over 2tb. It should be fine if they are on their own drives.

johnnymk

I believe the case acts if the two drives are one, not as separate units.

GuruX

I still remember when FAT16 was the file system of choice, and we couldn't have partitions larger than 2GB..... little did I realize how soon we'd run up against the 2TB barrier!

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DarkFury

Well that might be a problem...

Windows XP can only address 2TB as one volume... So it sounds like he needs to find a way to make the system see each drive as an individual volume.

BTW.. what kind of case are we talking here? Is this some kind of networked storage device?

DarkFury

Also... just for the record, I just installed a 1.5 TB drive in my main computer (a Seagate 7200.11 drive)

I also have 2 other drives in this PC (a 500GB and a 400GB) and Windows XP fully recognizes all of the drives at their full listed sizes. The 1.5 TB drive lists as 1397.26 GBs in XP (but that is to be expected due to the way the size is calculated).

So more or less, it's the case he's using that is at fault here. He might want to consider only using one of those 2 drives in that case and taking the other one and installing it in a different computer.

Hope my info helps you some...

Maarchk

You just wanted to show off your big drives...

Oh well, i didn't even know xp had the 2tb limit nor did i know about xp64. I learned a lot today...

oh and don't you guys worry about the harddrive dying and losing soo much data in one swoop?

johnnymk

http://www.xpcgear.com/xs2b35urbk.html

This is the case

MrGreg

The description of that drive case specifically states up to 2 TB.

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DarkFury

No, I do not worry about losing my data...

The reason why... I backup my data.


My main drive is a 400 GB SATA drive (which is partitioned to separate program data on one partition and data on a separate partition). I do periodic (i.e. weekly) backups of both my programs and my data to a separate drive (which will be the new 1.5 TB drive I just bought... previously these backups went to the 500 GB drive).

You have to ask yourself... "What is the likelihood that BOTH of these drives will fail simultaneously?" Yes, they could both burn up in a fire or something like that, but under normal operations, the data is discreetly kept in 2 separate places.

This being the case, if the system drive dies, that data can be restored in about an hour. If the backup dies (which is sorta unlikely since it doesn't spin up quite as much as the system drive) then I can just create a new backup archive from the working system drive if necessary. Either way, I'm generally covered.

On top of all of this, since I do incremental backups with Acronis now, I can roll back these files over several previous generations if necessary... however keeping all of these older files does take up alot of space hence the need for me getting the new 1.5 TB drive.

To me, saving my data is the most important thing of all. I can lose all of my programs, but I don't want my DATA going anywhere!!! plus data recovery solutions cost 10x or more the cost of a new hard drive.

It's just a smart thing to do in my opinion.

DarkFury

Yup...


Maybe the friend should have read this before buying two 1.5TB drives. Maybe it is possibe for him to return the drives in exchange for two 1TB drives?

johnnymk

I believe he is going to partition the drives. He believes that may work.

DarkFury

So I guess taking them back for a refund is not an option then huh?

BTW... this is a "raid array" case, therefore how is partitioning going to help him here? The case is designed to only show 2TB of space, therefore he needs to consider operating within those parameters I'd think...

Maarchk

I believe his friend is a Maverick and as such can bend computer hardware to his will...

And your protection is good DF. I just thought when you told us you had the 3 drives that all were in full primary use and that scared me.... But yes, 1 drive to back another up is good. And some disks on the side...

All my really important stuff lives on floppies... j/k

MrGreg

It's an expensive option, but I've always thought the drobo was cool. (needs built in NAS, though)