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2TB HDD limit on Dimension 8300?
Will my Dimension 8300 motherboard/BIOS support hard drives >2TB?
I'm using the most-current BIOS firmware (A07). I know that after I upgrade from XP to Win8Pro my OS won't have a 2TB limit.
Dimension 8300 Service Manual.
Incidentally, I do know that it won't boot to it (only motherboards with the recent UEFI could). And I did learn here that this system will support a non-boot HDD >2TB on an expansion card (because they use their own BIOS ). I'm simply wondering in this thread about the 2 onboard SATA ports.
If no one knows, I'll probably go ahead and get a 4TB hdd and try it, and report back.
osprey4
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November 4th, 2012 13:00
Hi Coyote5,
I believe the hardware will but XP won't. But an expension card will definitely solve the problem.
Obviously, this is a pretty old machine.
coyote5
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November 4th, 2012 17:00
Thank you both for your replies!
As I said in my question, I know XP has a 2TB limit.
As I also said in my question, I'll be (very soon) upgrading to Win8.
speedstep
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November 4th, 2012 17:00
2TB is the limit for XP and or 32 bit os. Controller wont fix this.
LARGER partitions require a GUID boot partition not MBR boot.
Specifically, you can’t access over 2 TB of data using a 32 bit operating system.
coyote5
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November 4th, 2012 18:00
I believe this is incorrect. The first page I googled that could document this for you is here.
speedstep
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November 4th, 2012 18:00
GUID Partitions require GUID bios. Unless your bios and Processor support EMT64 aka 64 bit os this is not going to change. 32 BIT os versions have 2TB limits. XP / VISTA / WINDOWS 7 /WINDOWS 8 does not change this.
Windows 8 also requires PAE, SSE2, Execute Disable Bit capability in the BIOS as well as the CPU.
If you do not have NX then you will not be upgrading to windows 8.
Partition Size Limitation
The partition size is pretty straight forward. On an MBR (Master Boot Record) disk, the locations where the partition sizes are stored are only 4 bytes long. Since this is in hexadecimal, the largest value we can stuff in there is all F’s. So the max value would 4,294,967,295 in decimal.
FF FF FF FFh = 4294967295d (This represents 32 Bits) 8 Bits Per FF hex. AN EMT 64 processor and OS can address more than 32 bits.
This maximum partition size is not in bytes, it is in number of sectors. Since currently sectors are limited to 512 bytes, the maximum size ends up being 2 TB.
4,294,967,295 sectors * 512 bytes/sectors = 2,199,023,255,040 bytes or 2TB.
Number of Clusters
The second limitation is harder to spot. It is a limitation of NTFS. NTFS is limited to (2^32 -1) clusters….no matter what. The smallest cluster size possible is 512 bytes (1 sector). So again the math leaves us at 2,199,023,255,040 or 2TB.
(2^32)-1 = (4,294,967,296)-1 = 4,294,967,295 clusters
4,294,967,295 clusters * 512 bytes/cluster = = 2,199,023,255,040 bytes or 2TB
A GPT disk uses the GUID partition table (GPT) disk partitioning system. To boot from this you need EFI firmware.
Can be used as a storage volume on all x64-based platforms, including platforms running Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Windows Disk Support
WDC caveats this by saying "Even with the controller your system may not support the 3TB drive"
rdunnill
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November 4th, 2012 20:00
Vista, 7, and 8 32-bit will recognize greater-than-2tb GPT partitions; I verified this with two different SATA-150 cards (SI3112 chipset), with both having no trouble fully recognizing a 3tb SATA drive.
speedstep
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November 4th, 2012 23:00
Vista, 7, and 8 32-bit will recognize greater-than-2tb GPT partitions; I verified this with two different SATA-150 cards (SI3112 chipset), with both having no trouble fully recognizing a 3tb SATA drive.
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coyote5
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November 5th, 2012 06:00
In my initial post I wrote that "I do know that it won't boot to it", so I think the reply by rdunnill is more helpful, and I'm prepared to mark his post the "Answer" but first, this
concerns me deeply. I googled and saw with surprise that in June that NX requirement was announced. I (think I recall) running the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant and having it pass; perhaps I did so prior to June. In any case,
Does my 8300's BIOS/CPU really not have NX? Is this something Dell can fix with a BIOS update, please?
rdunnill
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November 5th, 2012 19:00
It's a 2350, which has no built-in SATA support. However, the add-on card and its BIOS are seven years old, and they have no trouble recognizing large SATA drives. I see no reason why an 8300 would have this problem; in a worst case scenario, the OP would shell out $15 for a Syba card to get large SATA support, plus the cost of upgrading to Vista, 7, or 8.
It's a given that large SATA drives can't serve as boot drives except with 64-bit operating systems and EFI BIOSes.