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Windows XP TB Limit?

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rathoriel:

--- Quote from: x5ga on July 23, 2010, 08:13:37 PM ---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.

--- End quote ---

The answer was solved here. Use WinXP SP1 or greater

Edit-
For your playback issue in windows 7 are you sure all of your drivers are up to date?
if you are using the HDMI there was a driver update june 2010
also make sure the radeon drivers are up to date

costi:

--- Quote from: NaRu on July 25, 2010, 11:09:27 PM ---Right now the Bios is the bottle neck for the harddrive. Bios cant see anything bigger then 2TB drives.

--- End quote ---
Why would it not see drives larger than 2TB, if 48-bit addressing ends way beyond that?

x5ga:

--- Quote from: costi on July 28, 2010, 05:13:56 PM ---
--- Quote from: NaRu on July 25, 2010, 11:09:27 PM ---Right now the Bios is the bottle neck for the harddrive. Bios cant see anything bigger then 2TB drives.

--- End quote ---
Why would it not see drives larger than 2TB, if 48-bit addressing ends way beyond that?

--- End quote ---
Logical Block Addressing refers to the scheme which is used to locate the data on the hard disk, it is used by both MBR (BIOS-dependent) and GPT (mostly EFI-dependent) formatted drives. In the BIOS, both the partition length and the partition start address are stored as 32-bit quantities. The sector size is 512bytes, (= 2^9). So, this means that neither the maximum size of a partition nor the maximum start address (both in bytes) can be greater than 2^32 * 2^9 = 2^41 bytes = 2 * 2^40 bytes = 2 TiB. So, nothing can be addressed beyond the 2TiB limit because the outdated BIOS design prevents it. This will probably be one of the most important reasons to drop the BIOS-based architecture and switch to EFI. I have heard of some BIOS + GPT + Hard Disks >2TiB systems, but I haven't tested this, and it only works in windows 7/server 2008/vista SP1.

tl;dr version: it's because the BIOS technology is old and outdated, and not even 48bit LBA can rejuvenate it.

costi:
Since when does BIOS see partitions on a HDD?

TorturdChaos:
Way I have read it Windows XP can't work with anything over 2TB.  So say you have Raid setup with 4TB of space - you would have to partition it in 1/2 to get Windows to read it.

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