compatible capacities

The VCR King

The VCR King

Well-Known Member
My motherboard's bios (MSI 890FXA-GD65 gaming series) only allows up to a 2TB hdd to be installed in the system. If I go to the store and buy a 6TB USB hard drive, will it not work because it it larger than 2TB or will the mobo accept it because it ISN'T DIRECTLY ATTACHED TO THE MOTHERBOARD?
 
The VCR King said:
My motherboard's bios (MSI 890FXA-GD65 gaming series) only allows up to a 2TB hdd to be installed in the system. If I go to the store and buy a 6TB USB hard drive, will it not work because it it larger than 2TB or will the mobo accept it because it ISN'T DIRECTLY ATTACHED TO THE MOTHERBOARD?
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What operating system are you running?
 
Digxt said:
Wait.... Whaaa-? It isn't attached to your Mobo? :confused:
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You can get SATA cards that connect to the system via PCI or PCIE which contain their own controllers/chipsets. Then the drive would connect to the card instead of your motherboard's integrated controller.
 
It's not gonna matter. When its connected its still be gonna be recognized as a hard drive and won't see anything over 2tb.
 
Windows boot drives using MBR can only boot from drives 2tb or less. The limit is with MBR not Windows. If you were booting from a GPT partition you can boot from drives over 2tb.

About half way down there is a list of compatible operating systems that can boot from GPT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

When you initialize the disk, initialize using a GPT Partiton scheme and make sure that you have your chipset driver installed/updated.

I have a 4tb external drive here. I'll give it a test to make sure that I have everything right.

*Update- It defaults to initializing anything over 2tb as GPT. I formatted the drive as NTFS and mounted the drive. Worked just fine for me.
 
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salvage-this said:
Windows boot drives using MBR can only boot from drives 2tb or less. The limit is with MBR not Windows. If you were booting from a GPT partition you can boot from drives over 2tb.

About half way down there is a list of compatible operating systems that can boot from GPT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

When you initialize the disk, initialize using a GPT Partiton scheme and make sure that you have your chipset driver installed/updated.

I have a 4tb external drive here. I'll give it a test to make sure that I have everything right.

*Update- It defaults to initializing anything over 2tb as GPT. I formatted the drive as NTFS and mounted the drive. Worked just fine for me.
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Your motherboard has UEFI bios though so it would work for you no matter what. His motherboard doesn't have UEFI bios so it won't work.
 
His Motherboard has support for 3tb+ drives through a BIOS update. Version 18.1 or above supports HDDs 2.2tb and up.

http://us.msi.com/support/mb/890FXAGD65.html#down-bios

http://vr-zone.com/articles/msi-provides-support-for-3tb-hard-drives/11994.html

Take a look at this article all about 3tb drives and why the limitation was there. About half way down there is a section discussing setting the cluster size of an NTFS partition to allow for partitions larger for 2.2tb. Setting the cluster size to 2048 rather than the default of 512 will allow for partitions up to 8.8tb.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything-you-need-to-know-about-3tb-hard-drives.html
 
Can you explain why?

I'm fine with being proven wrong, I just want to see the pieces that disprove what MSI is saying about their own motherboard.
 
It can be done. MSI is a little late on the draw. Gigabyte been doing it for a few years before they released a full UEFI bios. Gigabyte called it Hybrid EFI.
 
I won't push you to do an update. I've never had one fail on me, but if the process worries you feel free to run with what you have. You just won't have support for the larger drives.
 
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