500Gb Hard Drives

[sean.ferguson]

I remember years ago, in fact it may have just been in XP, that Windows OS' could only cope with a hard drive up to 100 or so Gigs.

If I add a S-ATA2 500Gb drive to my system, will I be required to partition it or will it function okay as a block device? I imagine it will, but I thought I would check.

 

[Caserno]

I have 2 running on my computer, one is partitioned and one is not and they both run fine.

 

[kcnychief]

Pretty sure that Vista is capable of supporting hard drives up to 256TB, although anything over 2TB has to be dynamic instead of basic.

 

[sean.ferguson]

lol, yeah I thought as much

Cheers

 

[kcnychief]

No problem.

All I ask in return is that you build a system with 256TB and take pictures of it :smoker:

 

[Geffy]

NTFSv5 (WinXP+) can handle up to 16TB of storage space with a maximum file size of 16TB.

 

[Kush]

the 137 gb thing was a bios thing if im not mistaken

 

[LordOfLA]

yup. 48bit addressing was introduced to fix it. We'll run into the same issue at 524,288 gigabytes

 

[Electronic Punk]

On a similar note, whats the best HDD setup to go for these days on a gaming pc?

 

[sean.ferguson]

the 137 gb thing was a bios thing if im not mistaken

Thats what I was thinking of, cheers

 

[kcnychief]

the 137 gb thing was a bios thing if im not mistaken

Was also a Windows XP SP2 thing

 

[profquatermass]

You always have to partition a hard drive regardless of size!
No OS can read a non-partitioned drive.

 

[zapoqx]

Hmm... could I take a shot? perhaps Western Digital Hard Drives are the best that you can get. Anything else I had, the hard drives either never gave me a warning of it about to die or if it did, it gave me a 20 min warning and then a loud click and die. At least WD, if its gonna die, you start hearing it at least a month in advance. Gives you enough time to buy another hard drive and still use it.
I have 2 WD 500GB in my system and then the 320GB Seagate for low end backup

 

[Caserno]

I have never had any problems with seagate, I have only used them for the last 10 years or so and never had a failure

 

[X-Istence]

All the hard drives from any harddrive manufacturers will fail! I have had drives fail from any of the big companies (WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Toshiba, IBM). I like Seagate best, their 5 year warranty is awesome, and is one of the best in the industry, that and their drives are VERY silent, whereas the WD drives will start to make a high pitch ball bearing noise, which is really annoying, and it will keep going, but the high pitched noise will keep one awake at night even if the computer is in a different room.

 

[sean.ferguson]

I personally always buy Western Digital. I couldn't really tell you why, but my first drive gave me no problems and served me well for number of years until the computer was sold. Now I continue to buy them as none have ever gave me any problems, I have never had a hard drive die on me.

I have just purchased a 2.5 inch Western Digital Scorpio for my Macbook and I expect that will be the same.

 

[Caserno]

Now that is what you call brand loyalty, its the same reason why I buy Gigabyte and Seagate and also still buy my parts from the same guy as I purchased my very first parts from, they treat you well and we keep buying from them

 

[sean.ferguson]

Now that is what you call brand loyalty,

I know also that, say for example the Scorpio dies on me in a few months. I will still buy a Western Digital to replace it because to have one die out of the many that I have owned is insignificant.

 

[profquatermass]

Hmm... could I take a shot? perhaps Western Digital Hard Drives are the best that you can get. Anything else I had, the hard drives either never gave me a warning of it about to die or if it did, it gave me a 20 min warning and then a loud click and die. At least WD, if its gonna die, you start hearing it at least a month in advance. Gives you enough time to buy another hard drive and still use it.
I have 2 WD 500GB in my system and then the 320GB Seagate for low end backup

You're living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
I'm a IT admin. I use Seagate Enterprise drives. These are designed to be that little bit better in quality and reliability.

Don't rely on sound to tell you a drive is faulty.
Switch on the SMART function in your BIOS and run a SMART program in the background.

Use a free SMART XP program like 'HDD Health'. This program even tells you when a drive is estimated to die on you! It works out the date from the abuse it gets! The longer it's ran, the more accurate it gets.
See http://www.panterasoft.com/

 

[Caserno]

Do you use SMART at home? I want to know how much it affects gaming performance.