Is there a maximum amount of data storage?

Mikeyc

Beta member
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4
Location
Australia
So I bought a computer off a mate awhile ago. And when I did he said something about having to make a raid if I wanted more than 10tbs. Iv looked up raids, and I don't really want one. Basically this is what I want to know, I currently have five harddrives running in there(I have all my movies on there). One 1tb, and four 2 tbs. in theory, could I replace all four harddrives with 4tb ones? Or would windows not accept them all or something.

CPU
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 31 °C.
Thuban 45nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 669MHz (9-9-9-24).
Motherboard
ASUSTeK Computer INC. Crosshair IV Formula (AM3) 37 °C.
Graphics
1024MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series (Sapphire/PCPartner) 42 °C.

Those are the main components. Any help would be greatly appreciated :)
 
in theory, could I replace all four harddrives with 4tb ones? Or would windows not accept them all or something.

You can, but you may have some interesting results.

If you're running Windows 7, then the following issues are known by Microsoft.

To this point, the following incorrect behavior is known to occur when Windows handles single-disk storage capacity of greater than 2 TB:
  • The numeric capacity beyond 2 TB overflows. This results in the system being able to address only the capacity beyond 2 TB. For example, on a 3 TB disk, the available capacity may be only 1 TB.
  • The numeric capacity beyond 2 TB is truncated. This results in no more than 2 TB of addressable space. For example, on a 3 TB disk, the available capacity may be only 2 TB.
  • The storage device is not detected correctly. In this case, it is not displayed in either the Device Manager or Disk Management windows.

Source

On the other hand, it's possible that you have four 4TB disks without issue... It appears that M$ neither knows the full problem, nor really cares about fixing in Windows 7.

Windows 8 appears to not suffer from these issues.


Your friend suggested to put them in RAID, probably because of the separate RAID controller which is handling the addressing instead of Windows, thus circumventing the issue.
 
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Hmm okay. So I wouldn't know for sure until I actually tried it? I'm running windows 8, so hopefully it will work.
Thanks :)
 
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