3TB hdd support?

[tongue_of_colicab]

Hi,

When/if (depending on how the job hunting in the land of the rising sun goes) I go back to Holland I plan on upgrading my trusty old htpc with a 3tb disk to get rid of my collection of too small hdd's.

Problem is, is it going to support 3tb disks? It's a gigabyte board with a amd 780g chipset. It's 5 years old, the latest bios update is from 2010 and the gigabyte 3tb unlocker utility doesnt support anything below the 8xx series so I guess I just anwserd my own question hehe.

But under win7 64bit can't I just partition the drive in 2 parts? I only want to use it for storage anyway so apart from not looking pretty it's not really an issue if I could use the 3tb like that.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Sometimes such kind of utility has "accidental" support or a simple hack makes it work, though I don't remember the occurence I read about and what was it for.
You can always try it as often "unsupported" is just that, unsupported, meaning Gigabyte won't answer your letters and calls.

Spoiler

There's also so few difference between 7xx and 8xx chipsets it might as well have been a renaming

Windows 7 appears to use a 100MB boot partition or has it as a boot backup.
It would be wonderful if you can put that on a small USB drive - that eventually can hang inside the PC connected to a mobo header. It how you could do it with linux, there you can create a /boot partition holding the kernel then when it boots, it deals with hardware itself and doesn't care about BIOS limitation. You would probably able to put that 3TB drive on a 486.

If that's not possible then you'll have to use your most silent too small hdd. The 3TB drive supposedly works fine as a data drive. You lose performance from the slower, older drive but you can put swap and temp on the 3TB one to win some back.

 

[Otto Dafe]

As Blazkowicz said, if you don't need to boot from it, no problem, you can make one big ass GPT partition for the whole thing. If you do want to boot windows from the drive than it must be MBR, and MBR will only allow 2T per disk, irrespective of partitioning. The drive unlocker utilities create a virtual drive (by means of a driver) which appears to the OS as a separate drive on a separate bus. I think Gigabyte will expand support to older models, but keep in mind that no unlocker utility/hack will allow you to have an MBR disk--and hence partition--exceeding 2TB.

So for example I have a Seagate 3TB, BIOS sees 3TB and win7 64 sees 3TB. If I run diskpart and type 'create partition primary' I get a 2TB partition. Running the ASUS drive unlocker utility creates a new 746GB drive (that's the minimum size for the fake drive). I think if I were you I might just get a 32GB SSD on the cheap, put windows on that, and initialize the 3TB to GPT. That way you get a speedy HTPC sans dicking around.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

That was exactly what I was planning to do. Only use my ''old'' 64gb sdd and buy a new 128gb one for my main rig. Cheapest ssd's are 35~40 euro's while the M4 and samsung 128gb sdd's are only ~85 euro's.

If Windows will just see the full 3TB when only used as storage that is what I'll do.

Thanks guys