kris23

Hey guys, today i found that the hard drives in my system sorta failed.

so now im looking for an alternative boot drive.

now many of you have heard of the new 3TB Seagate FreeAgent drives. basically one drive with 3TB worth of space. i wish to crack one open and use the Barracuda XT drive within.

Newegg.com - Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 3TB Black External Hard Drive STAC3000100

i was looking into this, but found out that my system cannot handle a partition bigger than 2TB as a boot drive.

so now im wondering, if i get this 3TB drive, can i partition it to have an OS partition (probably 120GB) and either have the rest not exceed 2TB?

or set it up as a bootable 120GB volume and the rest as a storage volume formed in windows GPT format?

thanks guys!

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BlueMak

Why the 2TB limit?


3TB as a main drive sounds ok to me, but, if I were to do that, I would make sure to get another one for backups. If it dies on you, you just lost 3TB of data.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Lowfat

Not going to work. GPT isn't the formatting type. It is the type of partitioning table used. Unless you have an EFI enabled motherboard you cannot boot from GPT. With an MBR partition table it cannot address more than 2TB per drive.

So either you are limited to only using 2TB of the 3TB drive when using MBR. Or you use GPT and not be able to boot from the drive.

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kris23

thats basically what im thinking, didnt really know what to call it.

is it possible to partition a small amount of space with an MFT and setup the unallocated space in a GPT partition?

or am i stuck with one or the other?

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BlueMak

So, this is that BIOS problem? Not more than 2TB per drive or per boot drive?

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

kris23

pretty much... only a motherboard with EFI can utilize drives bigger than 2TB as boot drives.

well i found out after looking at the drive, i can connect it directly to internal SATA data and power cables without even opening the enclosure. so ill be buying one sometime and experimenting with it...

if it doesnt work, ill just get a 2TB XT drive

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Judas

personally ..... why such a big drive even just to boot from?

stick with a small 100-250gb drive for os/programs..... and then use the 3tb drive for everything else...

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Lowfat

Nope. There is only one partition table per hard drive.

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OldBuzzard

QFT!!!!!!!

I use a 750GB drive for my boot drive, but that's because I have NINE OS's installed on it.

If you are only going to install one OS, or even dual boot, you shouldn't really need anything more than 250GB for a boot drive.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

Lowfat

Except than generally the bigger the drive the faster it is. The non-green Western Digital 3TB drives should be the fastest mechanical drives available.

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Judas

at the pricepoint perspective though... and the realworld data rates..

i'm finding that the for example... 2tb drives vs a 640gb drive is essentially no different.

sure the basic idea is that you stick a small single partition at the start of the drive where the sheer amount of sectors and data is highly compressed yet spinning on the outer edges of the disk allowing the heads to read the MOST amount of information possible on the drive resulting in the fastest speeds obtainable. Not taking into consideration that all the platters have the same data density... the larger hardrive simply has more of them....

but from my own results and figures... the difference betwene many of these drives such as a 640gb vs 2tb.... the speed is insignificant...... while seek times are increased and random access (time wise, meaning performing slower).. the throughput is basically unchanged or shown to have nowhere near the 5% faster results then the smaller counterpart.

So if you have a 2 drives.. in the same generation and type.... one smallest and one largest.... the smaller one is going to perform generally on par with that of the larger IF setup in the same manner (paritioning a small start of the area first for each)..

At this point in time.. it's best to spend the insane amount of money on a Solid State Hardrive if you looking for any ground breaking performance figures..... considering that Solid states drives are flooding the sata chipsets we have now.... and use a standard drive for the other things to store..

Personally I still don't use more then 60-100gb TOTAL space OVERALL.... when i had 2tb 3+ years ago.... i still only ever used 100gb or so give or take.. the only time it really jumped was when i was ripping HD-DVD's to the hd.. to play.. but now.. that point is made moot simply because i can play them no problems at all through my blu-ray player in my computer.... where as playing the HD-DVD's was kinda finicky and didn't like the lack of HDCP or lack of detecting it properly in the past....

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BlueMak

Judas, some people just want bigger. It's a fact of life. It doesn't necessarily have to make sense. Bigger car, bigger eh other things, etc.

I have only a 500GB for a C drive (and only internal drive) but I am finding it too small. Why? Because I have many games installed (380GB). I like not having to uninstall and install software all the time.

I think 3TB is fine if you have use for it. Just to make sure I get this right, the 3TB drives (and future larger?) will still work just fine with all their capacity usable, as long as they are not the C drive, right?

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

synthesis204

^true, but there isn't a need to keep your games on your local disk. You could just as well keep them on an additional HDD. I have 4TB worth of HDD, and 60GB of SSD; I run Win7, Word, itunes, photoshop, etc off the solid state, and run my games off of the 4TB. You dont need to have the games on the SSD; they perform just as well on a reasonable HDD.

BlueMak

That is only if you have USB 3.0 or other very fast connection, perhaps eSATA. I still don't like the idea.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

kris23

for your enjoyment



looks like i have a cap of 2048GB no matter how i go about it.

but im satisfied... once i get an SSD ill just reformat the 3TB so its all 1 partition

it was fun tho...

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Veridian3

All very interesting, good info to know. Thanks for being the guinea pig

Judas

lol

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kris23

lmao as long as im satisfied, i dont mind being experimented on....

after i get a nice SSD in the coming year ill probably do a full system overhaul.

this is the first time someone used a single physical drive as a boot drive in an older system... it didnt come out as well as i had hoped but its still better than just getting a 2TB drive...

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Lowfat

If you were to throw that in to a Mac you could use all 3TB.

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kris23

yup... macs and their rapid adoption of new standards... EFI etc...

oh well! im good for now! still better than just getting the 2TB XT drive...

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Judas

i swear i remember seeing something in one of the recent intel i3 boards i was playing with that had an option for EFI

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Lowfat

AFAIK I don't think any LGA1156 or LGA1366 uses EFI instead of a bios yet.

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OldBuzzard

kris, why would you want one lage 3TG paratition?.

It looks like it's seeing all of the HDD, if the partitions(s) are less than 2TB.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

kris23

the total number of active partitions on one drive cannot exceed 2048GB or 2TB exactly.

The OS sees it fine but it cannot do anything about it due to the MBR being maxed out. That is why all the options for the unallocated partition are grayed-out

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