>2TB HDD SATA limit

[danielbarnes]

Ok guys, need some advice.

A few months ago I purchased a WD Elements External Hard Drive - 4 TB which is one of their Caviar Green drives. During the process of trying to set up a small home server I removed the drive from its casing to use it directly by SATA rather than the USB bridge that is built into the casing.

However when I did so, I was only able to use just under 2TB of volume. Not the 1863ish GB you get from an actual 2TB drive but somewhere between 1.9TB and 2TB. Even with the drive in a raw state without any partitions, there was only this 2TB available. I am aware that drive of >2TB must be of a GPT format however this had no effect. When I reconnect the drive via USB again, it appears fine.

For reference I tried the SATA connection both with a Packard Bell S3800 (presumable SATA II) and an old Dell Precision T7400 (possibly SATA I, I'm not 100%) using Windows Computer Management.

I no longer have the 4TB drive however I will have the need to use >2TB drive in the future therefore can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks in advance,
Dan

 

[WebBeachBoy]

2TB or 4TB ??
Older Windows OS (e.g. Windows XP) could only recognise disks up to about 2TB unless it was a 64bit OS. There is also a difference in terminology. 1TB is 1024B but now it has come to refer to 1000GB so there is a margin of error.

External drives often suffer from poor quality components, either the adaptop fails or the circuit board. In the end you will probably be better off removing the disk and usin g it in your computer. I would make sure that your OS is fully up to date with all drivers updated to start with.

 

[FireWire2]

Ok guys, need some advice.

A few months ago I purchased a WD Elements External Hard Drive - 4 TB which is one of their Caviar Green drives. During the process of trying to set up a small home server I removed the drive from its casing to use it directly by SATA rather than the USB bridge that is built into the casing.

Dan

If you system sees 2TB from a 4TB HDD, meaning you have initialized it as MBR, instead of GPT...
To fix this issue do this:
1 - Back you your data, if any
2 - go to command prompt: type: cmd
3 - at the system prompt type: Diskpart ( no space), in the new window type: list disk ( with space)
It will list all connected drives - note disk # of the drive list as 3559MB
4 - Type: select disk # - where the # is the number of the drive shows 3359MB like 0, 1, 2, 3...
5 - Type: clean - it will ease the drive partition
Now you can exit from all open windows, than go to disk manager re-initialize, BUT make sure SELECTING GTP instead

That should fix your issue
Good luck

 

[fzabkar]

@danielbarnes, if your system is affected by a 32-bit LBA limitation, then your 4TB drive will be detected with a capacity of 1.64 TiB.

4TB - 2TiB = 1.64TiB

If that is what you see, then you need to update the driver for your SATA controller.

 

[danielbarnes]

Ok so for a bit more clarification...

Whether the drive was formatted as GPT or MBR made no difference whatsoever. That was the first solution I tried when I researched the problem first off.

Both machines I tried it with are use 64-bit Win7.

Are there no other limitations that could cause this as I have already exhausted the GPT option?

I will be trying again soon so I will do so with an actual internal drive and see if the results are the same (probably a WD red to be safe)

 

[popatim]

What motherbd do you have?
Is it detected as 4tb in the bios?

 

[HunterxHunter]

Ok guys, need some advice.

A few months ago I purchased a WD Elements External Hard Drive - 4 TB which is one of their Caviar Green drives. During the process of trying to set up a small home server I removed the drive from its casing to use it directly by SATA rather than the USB bridge that is built into the casing.

Dan

If you system sees 2TB from a 4TB HDD, meaning you have initialized it as MBR, instead of GPT...
To fix this issue do this:
1 - Back you your data, if any
2 - go to command prompt: type: cmd
3 - at the system prompt type: Diskpart ( no space), in the new window type: list disk ( with space)
It will list all connected drives - note disk # of the drive list as 3559MB
4 - Type: select disk # - where the # is the number of the drive shows 3359MB like 0, 1, 2, 3...
5 - Type: clean - it will ease the drive partition
Now you can exit from all open windows, than go to disk manager re-initialize, BUT make sure SELECTING GTP instead

That should fix your issue
Good luck

I agree with Fire-Wire. When you say formatted as GPT or MBR made no difference, I can assure you it may not have fixed your issue, but it is most definitely indeed important. You need to have it formatted into GPT for anything higher than 2TB. MBR can only support hard drive disks up to 2TB in size.

 

[popatim]

Rereading this I see the two pc's you mentioned. For a pc to natively support drives larger than 2TB they must use 48lba in the bios which is why I asked about which motherbd you had. Next up you need a 64 bit OS. Without bios support with your 64bit OS you are reducing to using a drive overlay driver which usually will give you full use of the drive but thru two partitions. These are sometimes called Disk Unlockers too.

Since the real liimit is 2.199TB , not 2TB, this is why you were seeing nearly 2TB from the drive that was in the enclosure.

 

[danielbarnes]

Rereading this I see the two pc's you mentioned. For a pc to natively support drives larger than 2TB they must use 48lba in the bios which is why I asked about which motherbd you had. Next up you need a 64 bit OS. Without bios support with your 64bit OS you are reducing to using a drive overlay driver which usually will give you full use of the drive but thru two partitions. These are sometimes called Disk Unlockers too.

Since the real liimit is 2.199TB , not 2TB, this is why you were seeing nearly 2TB from the drive that was in the enclosure.

I've seen that mentioned before yes. What throws me is that it shows the 2TB even in a raw state. Even if I create partitions, it has no effect on the total available size.

Without having the drive to hand anymore there probably isn't much more that we can consider. I'll probably have to wait until I purchase another I resurrect this thread then. It's probably worth be trying Linux as well as admittedly I didn't last time.

Thanks for the help.

 

[popatim]

Its the 32bit bios. It cant reference 4tb and what happens then is usually 1: it shows you the remainder after 2tb (something like 768GB in the case of 3tb) or 2: it shows you only what it can access (2.2tb).

I recently worked on an 890fx system with the same issue. Strangely putting the sata ports into raid mode allowed access to the full 6tb drive - it just took 5 minutes to boot afterwards. LoL

 

[danielbarnes]

Its the 32bit bios. It cant reference 4tb and what happens then is usually 1: it shows you the remainder after 2tb (something like 768GB in the case of 3tb) or 2: it shows you only what it can access (2.2tb).

I recently worked on an 890fx system with the same issue. Strangely putting the sata ports into raid mode allowed access to the full 6tb drive - it just took 5 minutes to boot afterwards. LoL

Forgive my slightly amateur knowledge on this but both my machines are running 64-bit. My application will most likely be using the old Dell T7400 with a RAID card but for standard volume use.

 

[popatim]

Then its up to the riad cards firmware if it support drives larger than 2.2TB.

 

[FireWire2]

If you're using BIOS Raid, then you need to update your BIOS and drivers to see more than 2TB.
As for 32bit LBA, you wont see 2TB for a HDD > 2TB, it's more likely a strange number

You system can handle more than 2TB, it just the BIOS cut off at 2TB