what is the largest hard drive that WindowsXP can "see"?

I'm thinking of getting another external usb-driven hard drive to use
for various back-up imaging and general storage. I have 32 bit XP. I
know it can see 500gig, can it see 1 terrabyte?

On 13/11/2011 12:56 AM, John B. Smith wrote:
I'm thinking of getting another external usb-driven hard drive to use
for various back-up imaging and general storage. I have 32 bit XP. I
know it can see 500gig, can it see 1 terrabyte?

Mine has no trouble with 2 TB...

--

Krypsis

John B. Smith wrote:
I'm thinking of getting another external usb-driven hard drive to use
for various back-up imaging and general storage. I have 32 bit XP. I
know it can see 500gig, can it see 1 terrabyte?

There is a difference between data and boot.

And since this is USB, this tells my your drive is
most likely to be used for data. There are some OSes
that can boot from USB storage, but WinXP isn't one of
the easier candidates (there is a hack for it).

What you're looking for, is an article on GPT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

MBR handles up to 2.2TB. GPT handles larger than that.
The table in that article, shows things that can actually
boot from GPT, and "Windows 7 x86-64 Boot from GPT on EFI"
is supposed to be able to boot from GPT. That would take
a relatively modern motherboard, and new OS install.

*******

Note - any time you commission a disk subsystem, where the
storages crosses some imaginary boundary, it pays to test
to see whether the boundary can be crossed safely. And whether
the test file(s) stored on the volume, are in fact intact.
On a 2.2TB+ volume, that could take virtually forever :-)
I think single disks are for sale now, up to 4TB in size.

To give an example of the importance of this, somebody set
up a large RAID, using TB sized disks, and managed to configure
it to go past the 2.2TB mark. He was transferring music files
or movies or something, and suddenly the file system corrupted.
He was wondering whether he could get the files back or not.
That's the kind of situation you want to avoid, and it's better
to use throw-away test data or artificial test means, to check
that the thing is working properly.

If you bought a 1TB or 2TB disk, there would be no need to
do any boundary testing. With a 3TB or 4TB or some large
RAID array of multiple disks, then testing is a good idea.
It takes forever to file, forever to do maintenance on large
volumes like that. If the speed had scaled with the capacity,
it wouldn't have been quite so bad.

To make large files, Microsoft has a utility called FSUTIL, but
the problem with it, is it creates sparse files on NTFS file
systems. Which are useless for verifying hardware based problems
(say, 48 bit LBA test case). That leaves "dd" as the only thing
handy for creating a large file (short of doing copy and paste type
testing, which I've done, but it sucks due to the manual
labor part of it).

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

That's a command line program. This, for example, would make a single
test file on an NTFS file system, that comes right up to the edge
of 2.2TB. (No, I haven't tested something this big works - this
is how I'd go about my test approach.)

dd.exe if=/dev/random of=G:\mybigtestfile.bin bs=1048576 count=2097152

And this would be sliding past that limit, by a 1MB block. Block size
is in bytes, and 1048576 is 1MB. Instead of /dev/random you can use
/dev/zero to fill the file with zeros, but that's not quite as
exciting. G: is my new big disk partition, filling the whole disk.

dd.exe if=/dev/random of=G:\mybigtestfile.bin bs=1048576 count=2097153

1048576 * 2097152 = 2,199,023,255,552 and that's where the "2.2TB"
comes from. Stated in another unit of measure, power_of_two based,
that would be "2TiB". "2.2TB" is how the disk manufacturers measure
things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte

So if you stick with a 1TB or 2TB disk, use NTFS, there really
isn't anything to worry about. Just the usual S.M.A.R.T statistics
check on the disk, and maybe some reading and writing to flush out
the "factory squirrels" from the drive.

*******

The last 500GB drive I bought, worked like a pig for several months,
before the performance straightened out. What I found helped it, was
using free HDTune 2.5.5, and doing an end to end bad block scan. The
performance curve looks reasonable. The drive is likely using 4KB sectors inside,
with 512 byte emulation by the drive controller (which means, 4KB alignment,
can help performance). That's an ugly topic all of its own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_format

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whit...nology_faq.pdf

That change was made for the manufacturer's gain, and has nothing to
do with making user's lives easier. The fact they can force the controller
to fix a problem they created themselves, is just gee-whiz stuff :-(

The sad part, is many drives contain no markings or marketing information
pertaining to the usage of 4KB internally, or the usage of emulation
to fix the 4KB mess when used with an older OS. Lots of fun reading to
do, and generally, forced on you when you notice R/W performance is
in the toilet.

"AcronisAlignTool_s_e_2_0_107.exe"
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=128

http://support.wdc.com/download/note...ease_Notes.pdf

The original announcement of 4KB sectors is here, but some of the
emulation crap, seemed to be added after the fact. An "improvement"
if you will.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888

Paul

On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 08:56:26 -0500, John B. Smith
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I'm thinking of getting another external usb-driven hard drive to use
for various back-up imaging and general storage. I have 32 bit XP. I
know it can see 500gig, can it see 1 terrabyte?

Seagate's 3TB GoFlex and WD's 3TB My Book are both plug-in compatible
with Windows XP. This is because the USB-SATA bridge chip is
configured for 4KB LBAs rather than 512 bytes. Therefore the
theoretical maximum size for Windows XP would be 16TiB when using an
MBR partition. The 512-byte LBA limit would be 2TiB.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Internally for data, 2TB
External (USB), 3TB

"John B. Smith" wrote in message
...

I'm thinking of getting another external usb-driven hard drive to use
for various back-up imaging and general storage. I have 32 bit XP. I
know it can see 500gig, can it see 1 terrabyte?

On Nov 13, 6:39 pm, "TimDrouillard" wrote:
Internally for data, 2TB
External (USB), 3TB

"John B. Smith" wrote in messagenews:0jusb79r7bierpr1q2ttfintv2ojkct9op@4ax .com...

I'm thinking of getting another external usb-driven hard drive to use
for various back-up imaging and general storage. I have 32 bit XP. I
know it can see 500gig, can it see 1 terrabyte?

That's dependent on the docking station or whatever USB gizzmo you're
sticking one into. I've a couple Rosewill, one unit free w/ a HD
purchase and another for $10, that will variously see/are rated up to
1.5T. Seems I might have been doing weird stuff with pre-formating
them with a likes of Easeus before putting them into an ASUS MB BIOS
that definitely didn't support that large a drive. Or something. The
ASUS MB has went since practically belly up. Not sure, either, would
tend to doubt offhand, if I've actually a 2G in a stack of 3 or 4 1+T,
large "GREEN" drives. Thermaltake, btw, is dumping their USB2 docking
stations in front of the USB3 onslaught after a suitable course of
rebate hoops for jumping through. Geez, hope they don't get stuck
with any leftover extras that cost $50 at the time I got my
Rosewills. Saw the Thermaltakes for $10 on sale yesterday or today,
not for sure where but possibly on Newegg. They'll be spec'd out for a
drive-size range, anyway, in their lit.