Asus P5N7A-VM support 4TB hard drive?

[Peroxyde]

Hi,

Can you please help me to decipher the specs of the Asus P5N7A-VM motherboard to check it supports the 4TB drive Seagate ST4000DM000? This board was purchased in Aug 2008.

Mobo specs: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5N7AVM/#specifications

I have already flashed the latest bios 0519 which says "Fix the HDD size is shown incorrectly when the size is bigger than 2.2TB". However I am not sure if it could really support a 4TB drive. I don't know if the bios is UEFI and I wonder if UEFI is a requirement to support +2.2 TB drives.

Thanks in advance for any clarification.

 

[bononos]

I don't know if the bios is uefi, it probably isn't because of its age 2010.
uefi isn't necessary to support >2.2Gb drives, it is only necessary if you want to use a >2.2Gb drive as the boot OS drive.

 

[Peroxyde]

I don't know if the bios is uefi, it probably isn't because of its age 2010.
uefi isn't necessary to support >2.2Gb drives, it is only necessary if you want to use a >2.2Gb drive as the boot OS drive.

Oh this explains everything. Fortunately, the computer boots on a small drive. The 4TB is only for data. If so I am quite positive this will works. Thanks for the clarification.

EDIT: confirm 4TB disk working on the Asus P5N7A-VM mobo. Entire disk used as single parition. Currently backing up the data on the drive. Same drive (NTFS formatted) is recognized by either Windows Server 2012 or Linux.

 

[nenforcer]

UEFI is not strictly a requirement for a GPT > 2 GB boot drive but also the latest OS since 2010, which is Windows 8 and Linux 3, which can read and detect GPT formatted partitions.

Apparently the hard drive makers have extended the sector size from 512 bytes to 4K in order to extend the life of bootable MBR partitions beyond 2GB. A legacy BIOS can boot from one of these drives.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Apparently the hard drive makers have extended the sector size from 512 bytes to 4K in order to extend the life of bootable MBR partitions beyond 2GB. A legacy BIOS can boot from one of these drives.

Not really. I am not aware of any 4K-native SATA HDDs on the market. Are you? Most of the HDDs that now use 4KB sectors internally, show up as 512Byte-sector emulation at the interface.

USB external HDDs are different, even XP will support 4KB sectors over USB.