3Tb External Drive and XP

petersmart

petersmart

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I always thought that Win XP couldn't see any HDD over 2Tb, yet I have just got a Seagate 3Tb Expansion HDD from Amazon and Win XP running on a duo core machine recognised it with no trouble. and showed the full size (2.7TB).

I had already used it on my i7 machine and formatted it on there (NTFS) and transferred 200Gb DVD files to it and they also showed up.

So can XP usually be used with HDDs above 2Tb because on the Amazon site many people have said that their PCs with XP cannot see HDDs above 2Tb and only report a small amount of the real space - usually around 700Gb or so.
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It's only if you try to use it as the main OS drive that you get problems, fine for data.
 
3 different situations...

3tb internal drive has a limit depending on bios, had controller etc.

If you get past that then you can use as data quite easily.

To use 3tb as your OS drive needs uefi instead of the usual mbr we have had for the last 20 years. This is coming out in new motherboards.

You can always use 3tb in USB drives as the motherboard issues are removed.
 
I get that now, just assumed the limit applied to USB as well.

Also very pleased to see the price of HDDs coming down, I got the Seagate one from Amazom for £83 which is quite good and, strangely enough, is cheaper then an equivalent internal 3TB drive.
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