How could the computer industry allow this to happen?

[sxr7171]

http://blogs.computerworld.com/1612...b_drive_wont_work_on_your_pc?source=rss_blogs

I mean come on. They push useless crap on us like SATA 6Gbps (okay SSDs benefit in fringe amounts). But they can't prepare for something this big? Why hasn't the Windows world embraced UEFI yet? Why are we all using ancient BIOSes? We had 2TB drives a year ago so why didn't they prepare for the next jump?

 

[whitesammy]

they make useless stuff like this so that we can be prepared for the technology thats ahead. its just warning us and letting us know but i don't think 3tb's will be out anytime soon. only a few percent have purchased SSD let alone know that they even have one in their netbooks.

usb 3.0 is still building up also. their spending our money on stuff that we don't even use and expect us to buy it and hopefully gain profit from it. sad world we live in

 

[sandorski]

Not the first time such limits have been reached. Back in the Win95 era(possibly before, during Win 3.1) it was common to have to Install HardDrive Utilities specifically designed to deal with Address limitations. It's really not that much of a deal IMO, it will be fixed.

 

[sxr7171]

Well it's not that simple. I run a WHS and I could really use those 3TB drives. If I were to build my machine today there are scarcely any boards that support UEFI. However it's easy to find ones with 6Gbps.

 

[sandorski]

Well it's not that simple. I run a WHS and I could really use those 3TB drives. If I were to build my machine today there are scarcely any boards that support UEFI. However it's easy to find ones with 6Gbps.

Add more 2tb HDs or spring for one of those mobos. Probably won't be too long before all new Mobos have no problems.

 

[Emulex]

many servers use UEFI and raid cards make the size irrelevant. its consumer junk that is lagging.

 

[corkyg]

many servers use UEFI and raid cards make the size irrelevant. its consumer junk that is lagging.

It can also be said that consumers are lagging. We sometimes tend to view the market through geek eyes and ignore the current economic realities.

 

[lsv]

This happens all the time, Windows XP and the 3.7~ or whatever cap for memory. Old caps for hard drive sizes past what like 127gigs or whatever the magic number was?

It'll fix up in time and everyone will upgrade. Don't cry wolf just yet ;D

 

[Idontcare]

Not the first time such limits have been reached. Back in the Win95 era(possibly before, during Win 3.1) it was common to have to Install HardDrive Utilities specifically designed to deal with Address limitations. It's really not that much of a deal IMO, it will be fixed.

I was thinking the same...there for a while it seemed like we encountered the latest addressing limitation every other year while OS and hardware guys sorted out their issues.

Remember all the hubub over CHS and LBA, and the BIOS options for selecting "Large disk", etc? Those days you felt like a geeky power-user if you knew how to setup the BIOS to use large disks lol

 

[killster1]

so are the 2tb drives even reliable? ive been holding off on getting any and have stuck to 1tb drives since the reviews for most 2tb say "failed in 2 weeks" "going on my 3rd drive hope this one works", also if you want more space just get a raid card that does 256 drives, just saw one the other day sure it was 1000$ but would be worth it

 

[sxr7171]

Add more 2tb HDs or spring for one of those mobos. Probably won't be too long before all new Mobos have no problems.

It's not as easy as you say to "add more drives". You start getting into very expensive external cases and/or RAID cards, port multipliers + more noise, heat etc. But if I were to plan a machine right now to install WHS Vail it would be too early given this situation. But hey we've had Sata 6Gbps last year.

 

[Nothinman]

http://blogs.computerworld.com/1612...b_drive_wont_work_on_your_pc?source=rss_blogs

I mean come on. They push useless crap on us like SATA 6Gbps (okay SSDs benefit in fringe amounts). But they can't prepare for something this big? Why hasn't the Windows world embraced UEFI yet? Why are we all using ancient BIOSes? We had 2TB drives a year ago so why didn't they prepare for the next jump?

Because MS didn't push EFI support in their consumer OSes even as an option. As sad as it is, most manufacturers only do the minimal amount of work to support Windows so if MS had supported EFI in their consumer OSes we'd almost certainly have EFI as an option on some boards now.

 

[capeconsultant]

I have read around that 2TB drives are not really ready for prime time. That would make 3TB seem pretty far off. Not really worth worrying about.

These HD companies LOVE the be the first to announce a new size. But over the decades, I have never bought the biggest drive available as I think the companies get ahead of themselves and let the marketing department take over. My 1TB WD Black rules!

 

[Voo]

Yeah I'm sure most consumers can't wait till they get 3TB drives, I mean it's not as if most pcs were sold with 300gb hard disks and those still half empty.. oh wait

Also Vista and Win7 both support 3TB drives, just not as boot drives (not sure does Vista 64bit also support it or only Win7 64bit?) so that means the only people who'd have a problem with those drives are those running a ten year old OS or wanting to boot from the drive and using a 32bit system (and the only reason for that would be no 64bit drivers for some old legacy printers or whatnot - or maybe on a laptop with only 2gb RAM).
Horrible, horrible situation, yep. I mean you can bash MS all you want, but come on, there are many, many things that are more important out there (I don't have to link that xkcd comic about the number of supported cores, right? )

 

[Nothinman]

I mean you can bash MS all you want, but come on, there are many, many things that are more important out there

Sure, MS has screwed up a lot of things for the computer industry. But this is one of those things that they did intentionally.

 

[alfa147x]

is this a windows thing? or does this also affect OS X or linux?

 

[Voo]

Sure, MS has screwed up a lot of things for the computer industry. But this is one of those things that they did intentionally.

Do we really need all of those bashings here? I mean you don't really think that not being able to boot from 3TB drives on 32bit OSes is a real problem, do you? Not many reasons to get a 32bit OS in these days in any way, so I'd love to hear about people for whom that'd be a real problem..

Something different: Is the platter size of those drives already known? 6 500gb platter sound like an awfully bad idea.

 

[GlacierFreeze]

This happens all the time, Windows XP and the 3.7~ or whatever cap for memory. ...

That has nothing to do with Win XP. That's a 32-bit issue. Need 64-bit, which is available with XP.

 

[Nothinman]

Do we really need all of those bashings here? I mean you don't really think that not being able to boot from 3TB drives on 32bit OSes is a real problem, do you? Not many reasons to get a 32bit OS in these days in any way, so I'd love to hear about people for whom that'd be a real problem..

Something different: Is the platter size of those drives already known? 6 500gb platter sound like an awfully bad idea.

The inability to boot from >2TB volumes is only 1 symptom of the problem. EFI has been around for 10 years now, there's absolutely no reason for motherboards to still be shipping legacy PC BIOSes. But they had no motivation to support EFI because MS explicitly and deliberately disabled support for it in a few of their OS SKUs.

That has nothing to do with Win XP. That's a 32-bit issue. Need 64-bit, which is available with XP.

Actually it has everything to do with XP. MS could easily support >4G of memory in their 32-bit client OSes if they wanted, but they decided to artificially handicap them.

 

[TheStu]

is this a windows thing? or does this also affect OS X or linux?

For OS X, with the intel switch Apple moved to EFI, so real Macs (Hacks I am not too sure about) are all fine.

 

[Nothinman]

For OS X, with the intel switch Apple moved to EFI, so real Macs (Hacks I am not too sure about) are all fine.

And Linux will still need a motherboard with EFI, but GRUB and Linux already support EFI so we'll be ready when they arrive.

 

[alfa147x]

For OS X, with the intel switch Apple moved to EFI, so real Macs (Hacks I am not too sure about) are all fine.

Good stuff!

And Linux will still need a motherboard with EFI, but GRUB and Linux already support EFI so we'll be ready when they arrive.

I always thought on PC's the whole BIOS deal was the weakest link

 

[Voo]

The inability to boot from >2TB volumes is only 1 symptom of the problem. EFI has been around for 10 years now, there's absolutely no reason for motherboards to still be shipping legacy PC BIOSes. But they had no motivation to support EFI because MS explicitly and deliberately disabled support for it in a few of their OS SKUs.

Yeah we all know that and most modern BIOSes also ship with EFI support, so people who'd really want to boot from a 3TB drive, by the time they appear will have plenty options (MB/BIOS and OS-wise) to chose, but I'm still not exactly sure who'd profit from that at all..

 

[pjkenned]

Actually it has everything to do with XP. MS could easily support >4G of memory in their 32-bit client OSes if they wanted, but they decided to artificially handicap them.

So my tinfoil hat that protects me from Microsoft fell off for a second and I Google'd: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/uefireg.mspx

All guidelines and requirements that are described in this document apply to all supported platform architectures of Windows Server operating systems beginning with Windows Server 2003 and to all Windows client operating systems beginning with Windows Vista SP1 unless explicitly noted otherwise.

Then again... boot from a SSD and this is a complete non-issue.

Finally, XP 32-bit... do you have any idea how much ram cost in 2001 when XP was launched? 64MB RAM + 233mhz processor was the minimum back then. I would argue that no consumer would have been able to use >4GB in a motherboard at the time. And to prove that point a bit... here's Intel's chipset roster (thanks Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets

You'll note, basically 1 chipset between 2000 and 2005 even supported over 4GB of ram which was the 955X released April 2005.

Ok I found it, tinfoil hat back on. It is probably better than those mosquito nets Bill Gates is handing out in Africa anyway.

 

[Nothinman]

So my tinfoil hat that protects me from Microsoft fell off for a second and I Google'd: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/uefireg.mspx

Which says:

Windows operating systems support firmware revisions that are based on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Version 2.0 or later specification on x64 64-bit platforms and Intel Itanium platforms. Windows also supports firmware revisions that are based on the EFI Version 1.10 specification on Intel Itanium platforms.

I.e it only works on the AMD64 and Itanic ports.

Then again... boot from a SSD and this is a complete non-issue.

Sure, just throw more hardware at the problem...

Finally, XP 32-bit... do you have any idea how much ram cost in 2001 when XP was launched? 64MB RAM + 233mhz processor was the minimum back then. I would argue that no consumer would have been able to use >4GB in a motherboard at the time. And to prove that point a bit... here's Intel's chipset roster (thanks Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets

You'll note, basically 1 chipset between 2000 and 2005 even supported over 4GB of ram which was the 955X released April 2005.

All of that is made irrelevant by the fact that XP's PAE support wasn't crippled with the hard 4G physical limit until SP2, IIRC. All in the name of protecting you from poorly written drivers without even giving you the option to take your chances. Support was there initially, they had to take extra steps to cripple it.