Discussion Forums > Technology
Windows XP TB Limit?
theprophet:
I heard that there is a limit to the size of HDD that you can have on XP. What is the limit? I heard there is a way to have more space on it? I currently have 3 2TB drives on Win 7 but would like to head back to XP since I have been having problems with 7.
Is there a program I have to run to get the Hdds on XP? thoughts Solutions?
Sosseres:
http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-5400-ntfs-partition-size-limit-for-windows-xp
Probably has the answer. Basically, there isn't really a limit if you use the x64 version of xp, you never mentioned which xp version you would be using.
bork:
There are several things that can limit the maximum size your computer can use and it is not just a OS problem.
http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm
x5ga:
I'll assume that you will switch to WinXP SP3, 32bit version, and that the partitions will be NTFS. The maximum size a disk can have there is not so limited (It is theoretically limited at 2^32-1 clusters, which with a default cluster size of 4Kb would be ~16TB, and with a 64Kb cluster size would be ~256TB). 48bit LBA addressing is enabled by default (since XP SP1), so the 137GB barrier does not exist anymore. If you would need >256TB partitions, you will either have to further increase the cluster size, to switch to a 64-bit OS, to make dynamic disks, or to format the disks using GPT instead of MBR (which will also require switching to a 64-bit OS, either Vista SP1, Server 2008 or Win7, -not XP-, since there is no 32bit support for GPT, and maybe a hardware upgrade if yours doesn't support EFI). Keep in mind that we are talking about partitions here, the actual disks can be of a greater size, but you'd have to make more than 1 partition to be able to access the entire storage capacity. These would be the limits NTFS enforces. But... the NTFS with a MBR ("the usual NTFS") has other limits enforced by the MBR: since MBR relies on the BIOS and the BIOS relies on technology from the era of the i8088 microprocessor (that is "a long long time ago"), the limits MBR has are much lower than 256TB or even 16TB - more precisely, exactly 2TiB (2 * 2^40 bytes) which is a little bit more than 2TB (2*10^12 bytes), the size of your disks. So, your 2TB disks will work fine.
tl;dr version: You'd have no problems with 3 2TB drives under WinXP SP1 or greater.
Freedom Kira:
I do remember something about the boot disk having to be under a certain size though. Like 1TB or something. But for storage, no problem. IIRC anyway.
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