Breaking the 2TB Hard Drive Partition Limit...

My only 3TB hard was installed on my Asrock mb and recognized by 64bit Win 7 with a 3TB Unlocker driver from Asrock. But I'm wondering if Windows 8, and any new motherboards out there, - if they got past this limit and can recognize Hitachi's 4TB hard drive as one partition... - Anyone know if this has happened yet?

I Googled "2TB hard drive limit" and came up with this good article: Everything You Need to Know About 3TB Hard Drives | PCWorld

One important phrase from it: Tip: With drivers or programs that don't allow a full 3TB partition, you can use Windows dynamic volumes to combine two partitions into a single drive letter.

Anyone know how to combine volumes in Windows 7 using this?

Edit: I also found this: http://carltonbale.com/how-to-break-the-2tb-2-terabyte-file-system-limit/

 

Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management : use this tool to set up a new partition in unallocated space on Your HDD.

Select a GPT partition instead of standard MBR partition. That's it!

I have 2x2TB drives in RAID0 with one 4TB partition on the array. It's a GPT partition, I've been using it for 2 years now, I never had any problems with it.

 

In order to have a single 2+ TB partition, you need 64 bit Windows as well as UEFI BIOS, and make it GPT as MBR doesn't support past a single 2 TB partition.

 

But is there any way to do this on ONE hard drive, like the Hitachi 4TB hard drive?

 

Presumably the GPT partition thing would work the same whether the partition was on a single hard drive or a RAID array.

 

That's exactly right.

 

As long as you are using Windows RAID it doesn't matter if it's UEFI. Just format it as a dynamic disk and RAID away. I've done this numerous times. But you will need 64-bit OS.

It's simple. Just note that there is CPU overhead for using software RAID.

 

I have 3-3TB on my Asus motherboard with Windows7x64 sp1 and they are GPT formatted and show 2.79TB once formatted....so from this if your BIOS supports large HDD then a 4TB should with GPT format show 3.79TB or somewhere in that range. You can never get full 4TB because of the tricks they used to calculate the capacity is not the actually formatted capacity. You should check Asus site to see if your BIOS will support 4TB drives to being with before buying one. FYI I do NAS with my Desktop as the Server that is why I have that many drives and it serves as my backup for all my data and files and as Server for my laptops to get data from and save to.

 

i have a similiar problem , i have ASUS notebook N53SV series almost 2 years old and i recently bought a internal 4TB hdd and an external 2,0 usb enclousure , but my notebook recognize the HDD only as 2tb harddrive , im desperate , ive tried enabling UEFI in BIOS , formated as GPT partition and nothing works , my system is WIN 7 home 64bit , i dont know what to do , because in my work we have desktop and notebooks from samsung with win 7 and 8 and they recognize my 4TB hdd , canm anyone help me ?