Workbug wrote:
On Jun 9, 6:21 pm, Paul wrote:
Workbug wrote:
I have an Gigabyte ep35c-ds3r motherboard running both Windows XP and
Windows 7. I'm about to buy a 3TB hard drive. Would this motherboard
support it? If not, is there a new driver update to make this
possible?
I'd start by looking to the disk manufacturer, to provide some advice.
One of the links here, will likely answer your questions. At a guess,
I'd say it'll be easier to make it a "data" drive, than a "boot" drive.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/beyond-2tb/
There is a barrier of sorts, at 2.2TB, which is where the fun begins.
If you buy a 2TB drive, then there is nothing to worry about. If you
use a 3TB drive, or make large RAID arrays or the like, then you have
further reading ahead of you.
Paul
Western Digital says only systems with new BIOS can go over the 2TB
barrier. That's why I'm looking for a BIOS update or some sort.
You can always set up a small drive as the boot drive, and save the
3TB one for a data-only drive. An SSD drive makes a good choice for the
boot drive, at least in terms of performance. Or some people might use
a Raptor for the boot drive.
*******
In a few isolated cases, there have been motherboards with two kinds
of BIOS available for them (EFI was an option). But for the rest, you'd
be stuck with just the one kind (either the older kind, or the newer
EFI/UEFI kind). The manufacturers generally only feel obligated to
release one architecture (they consider the stream of BIOS releases
they make, to be "bug fixes" - a new BIOS architecture isn't a bug
fix as such).
In only one case, I've seen a motherboard manufacturer actually
remove a feature, in the second and all subsequent BIOS releases.
The users were quite annoyed, but the reason the manufacturer did
it, is they didn't have a license to release the feature in the
first place :-) So their first release was an "accident". Other
than that, they seem to live up to whatever they stated in the
manual, as being a feature. Straying from what is printed in the
user manual, as a feature set, wouldn't be normal for them.
Paul