2TB HDD / 3TB HDD. Drawbacks? Reliability?

olivier renault · 21 Mar 2013 at 09:37

Morning gents,

Looking to buy a high capacity drive (or two, probably WD greens), have never really gone above 1TB. Any problems / gotchas I should be aware of with installing those drives? Also, anyone aware or extra reliability issues with those high densities? I'm running win7-64.

rpstewart · 21 Mar 2013 at 11:00

The only gotcha is that 3tb drives need to be initialised as GPT disks rather than MBR otherwise the full capacity won't be available. No particular reliability issues to worry about, just make sure you've got backups in place but that applies to disks of any capacity.

olivier renault · 21 Mar 2013 at 17:43

Thanks.

Read a little more info on 3TB, and it's a bit too much hassle, with compatibility and all that (one disk will probably go to my brother and to my sister for backup). I think I can get away with 2TB.

whiteshadow · 26 Mar 2013 at 21:33

I just installed two 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives.

I run Win 7 - 64 bit. It wouldn't let me form a partition initially due to the drives being over 3TB. Windows doesn't like to have 3TB drives as the primary partition.

You can get around it fine though if you have UEFI Bios. I had to boot the windows CD from my EUFI DVD drive option to enable me to install the 3TB drive as the primary drive. If you don't have a system with a UEFI bios I wouldn't recommend buying a HDD larger than 2TB, to use as a 'primary' drive for windows. Installing them as storage drives over 2tb's won't cause any problems though.

If you intend to create a system image of your primary 3TB drive, windows won't let you as it doesn't allow you to make a system image of a volume larger than 2TB's.

The way around that problem is to just partition your drive\s so that the OS partition is 2TB's or under, then it'll work fine.

I had to figure out how to get round the problem, which was a pain, but you can get them working fine.

zakblood · 26 Mar 2013 at 22:02

cost per gb v speed etc, still better to get 2tb drive atm, seem to be better value, 3tb and 4tb models seem to be higher costs still that the 1tb and 2tb models, saying that i have 2 3tb seagates drive as they where on special so cheap

Xelene · 29 Mar 2013 at 21:28

whiteshadow said:
I run Win 7 - 64 bit. It wouldn't let me form a partition initially due to the drives being over 3TB. Windows doesn't like to have 3TB drives as the primary partition.

3-4TB drives are okay as slave / storage drives I take it?

whiteshadow · 3 Apr 2013 at 16:29

kohlditz said:
3-4TB drives are okay as slave / storage drives I take it?

Yes. You won't have any problems setting up a 3\4TB drive for use as a storage drive.

It's only when you want to use it for your OS drive that you'll run in to issues 'but' you can solve the issues if you have a UEFI BIOS.

Took me a little while to figure out how to do it but I have two 3TB drives, one with windows installed on it and it works fine.