Partition Style

iviv · 26 Jul 2010 at 13:24

At the moment I have several small hard drives, and I've just taken delivery of 2x 2Tb drives which I'm using to replace them, the OS will still be running off a 1Tb drive.

Now, I've gone into computer management, and its asked me what partition style I want to use for the new drives, either MBR or GPT, and it mentions that GPT is recommended for disks larger than 2Tb.

So... which do I use? I'm running Win7 x64 and have no plans to put vista or XP on here, I don't plan on partitioning the drive, but I know that my boot drive is MBR. Which should I pick, and would I see any difference between the two?

dazzerd · 26 Jul 2010 at 14:03

I'm not sure it makes any difference other than that GPT cannot be used as a boot drive. I also thought that windows had to use GPT for disks over 2gb.

If you can format them as MBR I would, I have read in the past people having issues with dynamic disks.

Let me know how you get on though I'm looking to get a 3tb disk when they come out for my blu ray backups...

iviv · 26 Jul 2010 at 14:42

Thanks for the reply, gone with MBT as there doesn't seem to be any speed difference between the two, so may as well go with MBT. Though if you're getting a 3Tb one then I don't think you'll have much choice

SiriusB · 26 Jul 2010 at 14:42

Use MBR. MBR supports up to 2TB in a single partition so there is no advantage to using GPT. GPT is useful for much larger partitions [in a large RAID array for instance] or many smaller partitions.

MBT only supports 4 primary partitions - you have to use extended partitions and logical disks to increase it. GPT supports 128 partitions per disk under Windows [though the spec I think supports infinite numbers].