[SOLVED] 10TB hardrive in an old machine

velocci

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Dec 10, 2005
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Hi all, I have a Lenovo desktop that's about 7 years old. do you think if I put a 10TB hardrive in it, it will recognize it? the desktop is running windows 10.
 
Solution
Yes. It's not the drive itself, but how bios organizes the drive when it's first partitioned. MBR is a Master boot record, All the info for any and all partitions, logical or physical is stored in 1 spot at the very beginning of the drive. That works ok, but if the MBR gets messed up, All partitions are now affected. With GPT, there's no Master, each partition has its own data record at the beginning of each partition, so if one gets messed up, only that one is affected, not the others. Also means there's no need to access partitions or data records if they aren't currently in use, so if gaming on C and F, then G, H, I are effectively asleep, slim chance of corruption. It's a better system all around.

Because of Data size limits in...

Karadjgne

Titan
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Yes. It's not the drive itself, but how bios organizes the drive when it's first partitioned. MBR is a Master boot record, All the info for any and all partitions, logical or physical is stored in 1 spot at the very beginning of the drive. That works ok, but if the MBR gets messed up, All partitions are now affected. With GPT, there's no Master, each partition has its own data record at the beginning of each partition, so if one gets messed up, only that one is affected, not the others. Also means there's no need to access partitions or data records if they aren't currently in use, so if gaming on C and F, then G, H, I are effectively asleep, slim chance of corruption. It's a better system all around.

Because of Data size limits in the MBR (its a 20+? year old design) you are also stuck with a 2Tb limit (back then that was an impossible amount to forsee, drives were lucky to see 1Gb initially)

Pretty much any Sata or newer drive is GPT capable, only reason MBR is still around is the frequent use of 1Tb drives still. Once those are history, MBR will be too. Probably won't even be an option when setting up a drive in Windows 12.
 
Solution