Why are SATA drives capped at 2GB?

[Onceler]

Even the docking stations are capped.

 

[Cerb]

They aren't.

MBR is limited to accessing 2TB, and thus, you need to go pure EUFI to boot from a >2TB partition.

Docking stations may be limited due to the chips being crap, instead of actually being USB<->PCI/PCIe-<->SATA-controller bridges, which would allow them to support up to any size the OS can make use of. It could also be CYA: it might work fine, but they haven't done enough testing, and don't really care (Startech claims compatibility, FI).

As an example, I typically use an old SATA I USB dongle, with a JMicron chip, and it works fine regardless of drive capacity.

 

[Onceler]

I've found SartTech stuff to be crap, their USB3 docking station is slower than a USB2 docking station. I've tried two of them and they were both the same, my Thermaltake docking station was faster and it is just USB 2.0

 

[Cerb]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6014/startechcom-usb-30-to-sata-ide-hdd-docking-station-review/3

If a USB 2.0 one was faster, something was wrong with your USB 3.0 setup. That's showing up to 5x the speed that USB 2.0 will be capable of (around 35MB/s is as good as you will get...much higher, and you're seeing caching effects of the OS, not actual transfer speed).

 

[Onceler]

I tried it with two different StarTech's and they both were the same. I then plugged in an ineo and behold USB 3.0 speed.