I need more drive

October 13, 2011 11:30 AM

The 2TB drive on my server is getting full. I know there are issues with older computers running the 3TB drives. Can I use this drive with this computer (E5200 processor, Win7 Pro 64)? If so, do I need to do anything special when I hook it up?
posted by Crotalus to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Read this.

Short answer: you probably can't use it as your boot drive, but you can probably use it as a secondary drive for storing data on. If you want more convenience, move your "my documents" folder to the bigger drive.
posted by bonehead at 12:03 PM on October 13, 2011

What bonehead said. Do you have a spare drive bay in that box (it's specced at 2x3.5, 1x5.25) or are you already using another drive for the OS?
posted by holgate at 12:13 PM on October 13, 2011

I have a small boot drive and a 2TB data drive. I'm going to buy the 3TB to replace the data drive. Will I be able to make one huge 3TB partition?
posted by Crotalus at 12:17 PM on October 13, 2011

Will I be able to make one huge 3TB partition?

Yes. The OS will deal with it just fine. The low-level BIOS almost certainly won't support the new GUID Partition Table that replaces the old Master Boot Record (MBR) but the drive will have a faked-up "protective" MBR that would tell your BIOS that the disk is full or unwritable rather than empty.

Now that you've climbed over that limit, keep in mind the next one, for Windows at least, is an NTFS/XFS limit of 256TB/disk.

You may want to think about upgrading your optical drive (I'm assuming your external 5.25" bay is so utilized) with a BD-ROM Drive so you can offload some of that 2TB disk, as well, 25-50GB at a time.
posted by Sunburnt at 5:21 PM on October 13, 2011