Planning to buy 4 TB internal HDD for old 2008 mobo, will it support??

[manish30885]

Hi guys,

I am soon planning to buy a WD blue 4 TB internal HDD for my storage needs. I have an old 2008 manufactured motherboard Asus P5Q SE Plus. I've never used more than 1 TB single HDD drive with it so not sure if 4 TB HDD will be supported or not.

I need your advice regarding this. My motherboard will support that HDD out of the box or do I need to upgrade the bios or mobo itself?

Thanks in advance,
manish30885

 

[ko888]

If that motherboard doesn't have a UEFI BIOS then no, because of lack of support for GPT (i.e. GUID Partition Table) that supports drives over 2 TB in capacity.

Legacy BIOS only supports a maximum of 2 TB HDDs.

 

[manish30885]

If that motherboard doesn't have a UEFI BIOS then no, because of lack of support for GPT (i.e. GUID Partition Table) that supports drives over 2 TB in capacity.

Legacy BIOS only supports a maximum of 2 TB HDDs.

Oh, I thought GPT is a windows OS feature! But BIOS also needs to support it??!

Yes, my mobo has a legacy non UEFI Bios.

Can you suggest a cheapest UEFI Bios mobo which will support my CPU which is Core 2 Quad Q9505 processor? Or should I have to upgrade processor too to get a UEFI BIOS mobo?

 

[ko888]

If that motherboard doesn't have a UEFI BIOS then no, because of lack of support for GPT (i.e. GUID Partition Table) that supports drives over 2 TB in capacity.

Legacy BIOS only supports a maximum of 2 TB HDDs.

Oh, I thought GPT is a windows OS feature! But BIOS also needs to support it??!

Yes, my mobo has a legacy non UEFI Bios.

Can you suggest a cheapest UEFI Bios mobo which will support my CPU which is Core 2 Quad Q9505 processor? Or should I have to upgrade processor too to get a UEFI BIOS mobo?

UEFI GPT support in BIOS is required if you want to be able to boot from that drive.

The old Intel DP45SG socket LGA775 has a UEFI BIOS but doesn't properly support >2TB HDDs because Intel had stopped releasing BIOS updates before >2TB HDDs started to become available.

If you want to continue using your current motherboard you can buy a 2TB HDD instead. Or you can upgrade the CPU, motherboard and memory to something modern enough that supports >2TB drives.

 

[BFG-9000]

As long as you are using Windows newer than XP, a 4TB drive will work fine as a storage drive whether hooked up via SATA or USB. You just need to use another, smaller drive such as your present one to boot from.

 

[manish30885]

As long as you are using Windows newer than XP, a 4TB drive will work fine as a storage drive whether hooked up via SATA or USB. You just need to use another, smaller drive such as your present one to boot from.

hmm...that's interesting. So the limitation of using a larger HDD on an older system is only that one can't use it to boot windows... but can use as a storage medium?

The other guy told me to upgrade my whole system to be able to use a 4 TB drive!... but your suggestion can save me from the whole system upgrade costs!

from the information I've gathered so far, it seems I can use a 4 TB HDD on my current old mobo without any issues as long as I use it as a storage drive and not as boot drive (C partition), right?

that's fine because I already have other smaller HDD which I use to boot my windows 10 OS

So, it means I can buy a 4 TB HDD for my non UEFI based system and use it as a storage drive flawlessly in windows 10 right??

(which is why I want to buy a HDD in the first place... to extend my storage). 😀

Please confirm this and I will pick your solution bro.

 

[ko888]

The 4TB drive will still need to be partitioned using GPT. Hopefully you're using the 64-bit version of Windows 10. GPT isn't supported in the 32-bit version.

MBR partitions are limited to 2TB because of its inherent legacy 32-bit file system.

 

[BFG-9000]

GPT drives are supported in 32-bit Windows since before Vista-32 but after XP-32.

So you could even use a 4TB drive as extra storage in a non-UEFI board running 32-bit Windows Vista. Its disk manager does know how to initialize the disk as GPT instead of MBR to use the full capacity--you just need to tick the bubble to select it:

So yes, should work just fine as non-bootable extra storage in either 32-bit Windows 10 or 64-bit.

I actually have an external 4TB Seagate that works in XP with presumably some translation trickery performed by the enclosure! Seagate even had some software that allowed their internal 3 or 4TB drives to have a bootable MBR-formatted 2TB partition to coexist with another partition using the rest of the drive, but it sounded too much like drive overlay software for me to ever try it! The bad part about things like that is if the enclosure or motherboard dies, you probably won't be able to access the data by simply hooking the drive up to another motherboard.