Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[VitaminZ]

Hi, My Dell XPS 420 is running out of disk space. Thinking of buying one or more BARRACUDA 3TB ST3000DM001 but query if it would be compatible with my system, I think the Barracuda is Sata 3 (?) and not sure if my motherboard would support it.

Don't know much about computers....just enough to FUBAR them in a cloud of blue smoke, so any good advice framed in simple terms would be appreciated and might save a life.

I attach a Speccy report for my machine. Thanks, VitaminZ

[KenWright22]

Did you have any luck with this? I'm considering doing the same thing. I'm hoping to boot off the 3TB drive, not just have it as a secondary.

I'm very interested to hear how it went for you.

[VitaminZ]

Hi!

No news yet, the disk is still in the drawer waiting to be installed. Was hoping to get some GUIDANCE FROM SEAGATE !!! on this blog but looks like none of their tekkies ever visits it!

Checking out Youtube on 'how to install' it seems there might possibly be a problem with some motherboards not recognising disks of over 2TB or so, but I understand one can install a card that fixes the issue.

Not sure you could boot from it though.....I think the boot disk has to be smaller than 3TB.

Anyway, I will install it and let you know what kind of smoke appeared ! Cheers.

[fzabkar]

Have you checked the Common Issues section of this board? There are also these threads ...

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/Resources-to-overcome-the-2-TB-limitat...
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/3TB-Cuda-XT-Install-INCLUDING-EFi-amp-...

[KenWright22]

So for what I want to do, which is to boot off the new drive, it DOES sound possible as long as I split it into 2 partitions. According to the documentation here.

• Windows systems with Legacy BIOS and MBR boot drives are limited to 2.2TB partitions.

I don't mind having separate partitions. I'll be running Windows 7 (or more likely Windows 8 when it comes out shortly) so I can have the second partition as a data drive. I haven't tried this yet, so no guarantees I suppose.

[VitaminZ]

Thanks for the info! Very interesting and encouraging.