So I have been seeing news articles about how Hitachi is planning to make 5TB hard drives by 2010. But one thing that none of the articles seem to mention is the little problem they will run in to when they pass 2TB: The MBR partition table can not exceed 2TB. The limit is not simply 2TB per partition; It's 2TB per drive.

The solution to this problem is the GUID partition table. But it does not work on XP 32-bit. It does work on XP 64-bit or Vista. But then you run in to another problem: The BIOS can not boot from GUID-based disks. Only EFI can. But as of now, the vast majority of PCs don't use EFI. And only Vista 64-bit supports EFI anyways.

So basically, if your PC uses EFI instead of BIOS, and you are running Vista 64-bit, then you can boot from >2TB drives. If your PC does not use EFI, then you can use a >2TB drive as a data drive (not boot) as long as you are not using the 32-bit version of XP.

Here's more information on GPT:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx

Yeah 5TB kinda of crazy, but then again never say never. Although, first thing I thought of was "man, thats a lot of data to lose".

Absolutely. I would never consider running such a large drive without the redundancy of RAID. And if you're using RAID-5, then the best way around the 2TB limit is to setup a small virtual drive for booting Windows, and setup the rest of the space as a GPT drive.

Hmm... *right clicks, change label to "Torrent Downloads"* There, it has a purpose.

Hmm, I'd totally forgotten about that 2 TB limit, so a big thanks for the recap Chug.

For these kinds of large drives though, my first thought in using them is as data drives in a RAID type setup (e.g. Drobo).