Can the Intel X38 chipset support 4TB drives?

[sirhawkeye64]

I have an older HP XW4600 Workstation that has the Intel X38 chipset. Was wondering if it will support 3TB and/or 4TB hard drives (if they use the GPT partition table and NOT MBR).

I'm wanting to turn this computer into a home file/media server. It does support RAID 0,1,0+1 using the onboard controller, although I probably will only be doing RAID 1, if I do an array at all.

It will be running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.

 

[4745454b]

I was able to find this online.

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-023017.htm

Note it says server x38 boards, not all x38 boards. You might be able to figure it out by looking at the RAID controller and seeing if it's on the list at the bottom of that article. Note that while it might support larger drives, it will probably work slower then if you used the ones built into the chipset. Though if you are using spinning disks this shouldn't be a problem. I had this issue when I plugged my SATA III 840pro into a second chip on the board and didn't get the ~550MBps speeds I was expecting. Spinning drives don't transfer this fast so it shouldn't be an issue.

Edit: This seems like it might apply as well.

https://communities.intel.com/thread/25194?start=0&tstart=0

 

[sirhawkeye64]

Thanks. I'll look into it. The actual drive speed won't matter as the limiting factor here will probably be the 1Gb network connection, not the 3Gb transfer speed.