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I am considering adding a 2TB SATA II hard drive to my machine. My motherboard is ECS KN1 SLI Extreme. It supports SATA II and the BIOS is Phoenix AwardBIOS v6.00PG. I am running Windows XP SP3.
Will the 2TB drive be supported in my machine? If not, what is the maximum?
Is there anything else I need to check?
Alan Spark
Posted 2011-07-03T19:57:46.640
Reputation: 243
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You can put any hard drive in, look out for only SATA II 3GB/s drives though as getting a 6GB/s drive will be worthless on your motherboard as you need SATA III for 6GB/s.
Sandeep Bansal
Posted 2011-07-03T19:57:46.640
Reputation: 6 168
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Windows XP supports a hard drive with a maximum size of 2TB. This limitation is due to the MBR partition layout, assuming the disk uses 512b sectors. The limit is increased to 16TB (approx. 16,000 GB) if it has a 4K sector size. Upgrading to Windows Vista / Windows 7 will alleviate this issue due to their use and support of a GPT over MBR.
vcsjones
Posted 2011-07-03T19:57:46.640
Reputation: 2 433
For the curious, this is because MBR uses unsigned 32-bit numbers to store partition offsets and sizes (in sector counts). Thus, the largest number it can store is about 4 billion. 4 billion times half a kilobyte (normal sector size) is 2 TB (about 2 trillion). – CBHacking – 2015-09-08T23:57:24.850
Why worthless, it will be backward compatible, you mean a waste? – Moab – 2011-07-03T20:33:13.460
Yeah I guess a waste then, it won't be worth the money as you can just buy a normal SATA2 drive that will give equal performance. – Sandeep Bansal – 2011-07-03T20:44:29.860
Thanks, this gives me confidence that it is going to work! – Alan Spark – 2011-07-04T07:16:30.193
It is working perfectly, so thanks again for your advice. – Alan Spark – 2011-07-16T07:45:55.460
Glad to hear that, enjoy using your new drive! – Sandeep Bansal – 2011-07-16T18:39:56.650