We recently bought a USB3 Verbatim Store 'n' Save 4 TB hard disk for offline backups of our backups. It didn't work on the (Linux) server I wanted to use it on and also didn't get it to work on a Windows Server 2008 machine; the Linux machine just produced non-descript USB errors (impossible to enumerate device, error -71 or something) and the Windows machine did nothing (didn't even show up in storage management). On my Linux PC it did work. It was then that I noticed it was split in two drives (not partitions), to be compatible with MBR partition tables. I suspected that this was the reason the disk didn't work in that Linux server, but even using the Windows tool to configure its mode and setting it to contiguous didn't help.
I suspect that this special USB-to-SATA controller with this extra splitting feature was the cause of the incompatibility. But, now a store is saying that 'some motherboards don't support disks larger than 2 TB'.
Is that latter statement accurate? I would think it's up to the Linux kernel to support it or not.
