How to determine

Solution
Any laptop capable of using a 250Gb drive can use the largest drive currently available for a laptop -- 1Tb without any problems.

There are no constraints at this smaller size with anything that would handle a 250Gb drive -- the issue comes in once you get to 2.2Tb and have to use a GPT partitioned drive rather than MBR, due to limitations in the number of clusters/sectors that can be addressed. For Windows that means a UEFI rather than old BIOS and a 64 bit OS to be able to use it as a boot drive.

Read this for some basic info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Any laptop capable of using a 250Gb drive can use the largest drive currently available for a laptop -- 1Tb without any problems.

There are no constraints at this smaller size with anything that would handle a 250Gb drive -- the issue comes in once you get to 2.2Tb and have to use a GPT partitioned drive rather than MBR, due to limitations in the number of clusters/sectors that can be addressed. For Windows that means a UEFI rather than old BIOS and a 64 bit OS to be able to use it as a boot drive.

Read this for some basic info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
 
Solution

csnorman

Honorable
Mar 30, 2012
101
0
10,680
Great info, it threw me off because I asked HP support what max size hard drive I can get and they told me the motherboard can only handle up to 250gb. I like to put higher drives in when I fix laptops. thanks for the info