question on hard drives

[badbilly27]

I see great deals for huge hard drives and am in need to upgrade mine. Looking at 400GB drive to put in my Sony Vaio MXS20. I thought I read somewhere that computers can't format hard drives above a certain GB. Is this true? If I buy one of these will it work in my system?

Also any advice on a transfer utility to copy frive to drive (including windows)?

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

There are limitations on the size of partitions that various OS can 'see' however there are work arounds for all.

 

[Lord Evermore]

That last limitation encountered was a 137GB (or 128GB in binary) hard drive size, as the controllers built into older chipset could not address anything larger than that. Your system is new enough that that's not an issue.

Before that it was a 32GB limitation. And 8GB. And I think there might have been a 2GB limit. And 527MB (yes, we used to not even be able to rip a CD to an ISO file).

The limitations based on software were primarily due to the formatting technique used. FAT16 (DOS days) was limited to 2GB partitions. FAT32 supports up to 8 terabytes, however Windows XP will not format partitions larger than 32GB with FAT32, as NTFS is preferred for those. FAT32 is also limited to 2GB or 4GB file sizes depending on the application.

With NTFS you're essentially unlimited in your partition and file sizes.

Retail hard drives usually come with software to help you perform a drive to drive copy. If you buy an OEM drive, you can also usually download the tools from the drive maker, and there are other free utilities that you can easily locate if you search.

 

[badbilly27]

Thanks for the replies. You just answered why one of my hard drives I made external is not using all availbel storage. I formatted on old P1 the hard drive before inserting in enclosure. Ugh. I guess we all learn.

Thanks

 

[Lord Evermore]

Some external enclosures may also not support greater than 137GB drives. If the enclosure supports it, then you should be able to just repartition the drive under XP or Win2k to get back to the full space usage (obviously make a copy of the data first since you'd be deleting the existing partition).