High Capacity MBR Drives

[princern1999]

Everyone seems to think that an MBR drive can only utilize up to 2TB partitions. However I am using a 5TB WD external My Book drive right now with Windows XP and an ASUS P4P-800 MB and it see all capacity. I have only found that the same capacity in a GPT drive is what will not work. How is it that the manufacturer can make an MBR drive of higher than 2TB but a 8tb GPT drive cannot be converted by me to an MBR because of a restriction? How do the Manufacturers get past this restriction?

 

[jimmysmitty]

MBR has a limitation of up to 2TB partition sizes. Your external drive is probably using some proprietary or some other partitioning table as only GPT (for Windows) is bale to do larger than 2TB.

 

[firefoxx04]

I think there are some tricks that can be used to make it work but why bother? There is not reason to use MBR over GPT.

 

[princern1999]

I think there are some tricks that can be used to make it work but why bother? There is not reason to use MBR over GPT.

Well my reasoning for using it is I would like a bigger drive for my entertainment downloads and I have massive amounts of content. The problem is even if I upgraded to a Windows 7 or 10 PC, it still would not matter because my WD Live unit does not read GPT partitions nor does my Samsung TV and I am not going to go out and buy all new devices and TVs to make a GPT drive work. I'd rather use MBR and have a high capacity so all of my programming can be on one drive. Yes I could network it with multiple drives but I also like to carry my content around so I would rather have the one big drive and a back-up drive. I have never had a problem with MBR so I would say why bother with GPT when it already works fine for me. They just want to keep you buying more for nothing.

 

[jimmysmitty]

You best option would be to create a NAS with multiple drives then. It will put them in a RAID which can go beyond the normal 2TB partition limitation and could still be read by most devices as it will still be MBR.

There is nothing we have that can make a normal MBR partition larger than 2TB.

 

[princern1999]

You best option would be to create a NAS with multiple drives then. It will put them in a RAID which can go beyond the normal 2TB partition limitation and could still be read by most devices as it will still be MBR.

There is nothing we have that can make a normal MBR partition larger than 2TB.

Thanks!! 🙂