3TB drives and Server 2008 R2

[Chiefcrowe]

Before I buy one, i was wondering, would a 3TB external USB drive work as is in Server 2008 R2 or does anything have to be done beforehand to make it work?

 

[imagoon]

It will work fine. I have with an 8TB disk attached and it works fine.

 

[Nothinman]

You just need to use GPT instead of a legacy BIOS partition table in order to address the full space.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

got it. so basically you format the ext. HD as GPT instead of MBR when you're setting it up right?

 

[Mark R]

Most 3 TB USB drives come pre-formatted in MBR, and use 4k sector emulation (rather than the more frequently seen 512 byte sector emulation). These drives because of their special emulating controller will probably work at full capacity in MBR mode (unlike a regular hard drive), even though this is not a 'normal' configuration.

For optimal reliability - you should reformat the drive in GPT mode.

 

[Nothinman]

Most 3 TB USB drives come pre-formatted in MBR, and use 4k sector emulation (rather than the more frequently seen 512 byte sector emulation). These drives because of their special emulating controller will probably work at full capacity in MBR mode (unlike a regular hard drive), even though this is not a 'normal' configuration.

For optimal reliability - you should reformat the drive in GPT mode.

If the drive has 4K sectors and uses those for addressing, then maybe but there would be other compatibility issues to deal with. But no amount of emulation software can change how large of a number the 4-bytes of the BIOS partition table entry can hold.

 

[imagoon]

Yes in GPT mode:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          136 GB    16 MB        *
  Disk 1    Online         7450 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 2    No Media           0 B      0 B
  Disk 3    No Media           0 B      0 B
  Disk 4    Online         1000 GB  4096 KB
  Disk 5    Online         1700 GB  6144 KB
  Disk 6    Online         1115 GB  6144 KB
  Disk 7    Online         1118 GB      0 B
  Disk 8    Online         1024 GB  4096 KB