sikhwarrior Posted October 7, 2012 Share Posted October 7, 2012 I was wondering if ubuntu is able to use 3tb hard drives straight away or would i have to mess around with ubuntu to make it work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PrincessLuna Posted October 7, 2012 Share Posted October 7, 2012 Should work directly (assuming partitioning is done right). It was supported on Linux well before Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simplezz Posted October 7, 2012 Share Posted October 7, 2012 I believe a standard MBR partition table has an upper limit of 2TB per volume. So you can either divide the disk up into multiple volumes (which makes sense on a 3TB drive anyway), or use GPT instead of an MBR. Most of the partitioning tools support GPT nowadays. The limit is introduced because a standard MBR's partition entry uses a 32 bit unsigned integer to represent the number of sectors ( a sector being 512 bytes normally ). 2 ^ 32 = 4294967296 sectors. That's exactly 2 TB if you multiply it by 512. Karl L., javagreen and Nothing Here 3 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
javagreen Posted October 8, 2012 Share Posted October 8, 2012 I believe a standard MBR partition table has an upper limit of 2TB per volume. So you can either divide the disk up into multiple volumes (which makes sense on a 3TB drive anyway), or use GPT instead of an MBR. Most of the partitioning tools support GPT nowadays. The limit is introduced because a standard MBR's partition entry uses a 32 bit unsigned integer to represent the number of sectors ( a sector being 512 bytes normally ). 2 ^ 32 = 4294967296 sectors. That's exactly 2 TB if you multiply it by 512. This is correct (Y) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sikhwarrior Posted October 8, 2012 Author Share Posted October 8, 2012 So i can just pop in a CD and then bang it will recognise the 3tb hard drive ? And my motherboard has UEFI Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simplezz Posted October 8, 2012 Share Posted October 8, 2012 So i can just pop in a CD and then bang it will recognise the 3tb hard drive ? And my motherboard has UEFI It will recognise the drive. But the actual partitioning will largely depend on if you boot the system in legacy or UEFI mode. A simple way to try before you buy so to speak, is to load up the live cd and mount a volume of the drive (if it's already formatted), or run gparted if it's not, then mount the volume after you create it. I haven't heard of any major problems with Ubuntu and EFI. But let us know how you get on in the live cd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sikhwarrior Posted October 11, 2012 Author Share Posted October 11, 2012 I got a live CD it recognises the 3tb hard drive straight way Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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