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

[AlanM]

Larger-than-2 TB drives are beginning to hit the market, not the least of which is Seagate's 3 TB Barracuda XT drives - ST33000651AS.

The thing is, if you just take your new ST33000651AS out of the box and install it in your Mac or PC, you will almost certainly not be able to use the full capacity of the drive because of inherent limitations in your motherboard and operating system. 

So please see the following tools to help you achieve the full capacity. It is not difficult, and Seagate is, if I'm not mistaken, the first company to go to market with a >2 TB drive and provide an easy-to-use solution to attain to the full capacity.

First, please take a good look at our Beyond 2 TB page.

And (please forgive the shameless plug), I hasten to add the interactive guide that I myself wrote.  Interactive Guide for Larger-Than-2TB Drives

A different interactive guide with an interesting structure: Interactive Flash Guide for Disk Drives Beyond 2.2 TeraBytes (TB)[218611]

The following videos are quite helpful:

• Migrate your data to 3TB drive on Windows Vista & 7:Part 1 | Part 2
• Migrate your data to 3TB drive on Windows XP

And please also see the following Knowledge Base articles:

Windows Considerations and Support for Disk Drives Beyond 2.2 TeraBytes (TB)[218619]

Apple System and OS Support for Disk Drives Beyond 2.2 TeraBytes (TB)[218579]

Linux OS Support for Disk Drives Beyond 2.2 TeraBytes (TB)[218575]  

[LennyJ]

The 2TB limitation is one of the reasons I never upgraded my servers. Thanks for the guide. I'll go over it more thoroughly over the weekend. Thanks again!

[famiwin]

Thanks for informing us this issue... I would have upgraded if you did not share this to us.

[VeganFanatic]

 UEFI based system are now becoming more widely available. The AMD 970 (and up) based motherboards now generally supporting UEFI.  Prices are now under $100 online and are not bad.

[Honest-Lee]

I have a brand new 2TB Barracuda Drive that Win 7 Home Premium refuses to use as a system disk AFTER starting the system Setup. What the F? Win 7 will accept my 1.5TB that has gone bad but not the 2TB. How do I get the 2TB pass the Win 7 Home Premium size tests?

HL

[Cantbecanit]

2TB isn't affected Lee, I suspect you haven't loaded the sata driver, when Win 7 asks do you want to install a driver say yes and then shove the MB disk in and load it off there, swap back to Win 7 and continue.

[Honest-Lee]

Thanks for the Speedy reply. It never asks for any drivers, just says that it will not go on when using the 2TB, had no such prob with 1.5TB and 400GB both Barracuda.

[Honest-Lee]

I do have some advanced drivers for the MB but the System never gets to a point to install them, how do I get it to allow me to install new drivers? I do have a new Sata driver but if it does not allow me to use it, what good is it? My 1.5TB SG Barracuda is toast but still under warranty.

[Airsafety]

I installed a Barracuda 3TB hard drive as a secondary drive in my XP system and partitioned it as drives E: and F: using the Seagate software.

I have now had to reformat the primary drive and Windows now reports that drives E: and F: are not formatted. All my data is stored on this secondary drive so I definitely want to be very cautious with it.

All the support information I have found addresses using the Barracuda drive as the boot drive. Can you walk me through re-connecting it as the secondary without losing the data stored there, please.

Thanks,

John

[j7n]

Booting from a terabyte or larger disk doesn't seem to be of practical concern. Try backing up such a system partition. Which in turn makes UEFI irrelevant.

Microsoft Knowledge base states that “certain” storage drivers exhibit the LBA address overflow:-

Microsoft has discovered that certain storage drivers do not fully support single-disk capacities greater than 2TB. The behavior of some drivers may include:

• Overflow of numerical capacity beyond 2TB, resulting in only able to address the remainder of the capacity beyond 2TB. For example, with a 3TB disk, the available capacity may be 1TB.
• Truncation of capacity beyond 2TB, resulting in a maximum of 2TB of addressable space. For example, with a 3TB disk, the available capacity may be 2TB.

Many storage controller manufacturers have updated drivers with support for capacities greater than 2TB available for download. Contact your storage controller manufacturer or OEM to determine support for single-disk capacities greater than 2TB, and if there are any available downloads to provide support.

With properly working IDE drivers, presumably, the overflow does not occur, and one can either use the 2 TB as normal, leaving the “upper memory” for backup (created under Linux), or install a 64-bit Windows XP/2003 and utilize the whole capacity by formatting the drive with a GUID Partition Table. (UEFI support is irrelevant)

The question is: which common storage (IDE) drivers do work? Microsoft's default ones? Presumably not to force everyone to upgrade. VIA? JMicron?

The Disc Wizard “overlay” doesn't sound like a safe solution, when the drive is to be moved into another system. (As evident from the post above, and history with BIOS limits.) Prices for 3 TB are still higher than 2 TB, and thus they are not worth the compatibility issues.

Another option would be to set a Host Protected Area and lose the extra 750 MB capacity, which is better than having only that available for use, should the price of a 3 TB drive come down.