4TB drive, do I need a UEFI bios to use it as a storage drive?

bledd

bledd

bledd

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I want to get some more storage. My server is SATAII not SATAIII. Largest drive I currently have in there is 2TB.

Will it 'just work' with any machine if you format it as GPT as long as the machine has at least Vista on it? Or do you need a UEFI bios too?

My understanding is that you only need UEFI if you want to boot from a GPT drive. Is this assumption correct?

Final question is would all USB2 external SATA enclosures work fine with a 4TB drive?

Thanks in advance.
 
bledd. said:
My understanding is that you only need UEFI if you want to boot from a GPT drive. Is this assumption correct?
Click to expand...
Yes, that's correct.
bledd. said:
Final question is would all USB2 external SATA enclosures work fine with a 4TB drive?
Click to expand...
Not necessarily, unfortunately a lot of USB caddies can't cope with large disks. You'd be better picking a particular caddy and finding someone else who has run the same combination.
 
Bledd, you're not still running WHS v1 are you? Above 2Gb is a no-no unfortunately :(
- oops - sorry I mis-read it to mean you were dropping it in the server!
 
Running whs2, tempted to drop it back to w7 though, all I use it for is shared folders. I use robocopy for my backups.

I guess it's suck it and see with my icybox. Planning on getting a few 4tb drives
 
How have you found WHS2 compared to v1 - still can't bring myself to make the jump - can't get round the idea of not having drive pooling :( That said - getting a couple of 4Tb drives would make the jump pretty simple!
 
I moved from WHSv1 to WHS2011 after buying a couple of 3TB drives and finding that they didn't work.

I too was hesitant to move, but I spent the $20 on StableBit DrivePool and haven't looked back :) I've still got the backup function which I made good use of on WHSv1, and I've now got just under 8TB of storage space on my server, and I can just as easily extend it as I could in WHSv1 :)

You can still select just individual shared folders to duplicate onto multiple disks, too, so you won't waste your storage space by utilising RAID and duplicating everything - what's the point of duplicating my music collection when I've got the original CDs anyway?
 
Just to let you know Bledd that a lot of the new 4Tb disks has a sector size of 4k to accommodate the size and seek speed. Microsoft only full supports native 4k sector sizes on Windows 8 and 2012. See this article mate:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009

I would check to ensure that the 4Tb disks are not 4k sector size.

Cheers,

Stelly
 
bledd. said:
Will it 'just work' with any machine if you format it as GPT as long as the machine has at least Vista on it? Or do you need a UEFI bios too?

My understanding is that you only need UEFI if you want to boot from a GPT drive. Is this assumption correct?
Click to expand...

I have been messing around in work with GPT MBR booting hard disks which can be done but with some messing around MS put some tech in to do this ;) but in general uEFI will be required if you want your computer booting off a GPT initialized disk.

When talking about Vista uEFI is only supported on Vista SP1 but GPT disks it supports out of the box without any Service Packs :)

Stelly
 
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