Can intel 915GAV handle 2 TB Hard drive ?

[Shaga]

I'm planning to buy

Western Digital (WD) Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s HDD

So will the 915GAV detect it?

I searched, found some says any sata will detect HD as big as 2TB but not more, others says i doesn't work at all, others said windows shows it as 1TB only.

I can't find any solid opinion, i posted on intel community forums, but guess it will not be replied.

I'm planning to make this drive as main drive, and installing XP on it.

So what do you think ?

The motherboard will detect it or not ?

Any possible problem i'm gonna face?

[Farchord]

What is your motherboard?

Most of the time it's unrelated to the chipset, but to the board.

EDIT: Nevermind, that is the board, searching.

[Farchord]

It should support it. That board has the ICH6 chipset which supports 48-bit LBA on the storage chipset. The only limitation might be the BIOS, so if you update to latest, you should not *touch wood* have problems.

[Colin.B]

I did a search and it seems it will support it but this is based off of other things you may have already read. You could always email their(Intel) tech support and see but from what I can tell, it will work. It's a supported format.

Edit: It looks like they updated the storage drivers back in 2010 to support 2TB or higher HDs.

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about31350.html

[Shaga]

What do you think guys ?

[Colin.B]

I don't know. I mean, that seems to contradict what was posted on the drivers, which came straight from an Intel posting.Maybe he just looked up the product and none of the driver updates to know for certain?

Intel Rapid Storage Technology, version 10.1 adds support for hard disk drives with capacities greater than 2 terabytes in AHCI mode. It is important to note that booting to these larger capacity hard drives also requires an operating system and UEFI BIOS that supports booting to a GPT partition. If the system does not meet these requirements, these large capacity drives may only be used as secondary storage. Intel is planning to add RAID mode support for these large capacity hard drives in a future release.

Detailed Description

Note: Before installing this application or requesting technical support from Intel, it is suggested that you first contact your system manufacturer. They may provide software which is specifically configured for your system.

This driver provides support for high-capacity & fault-tolerant Serial ATA (SATA) RAID 5 arrays and high-performance & fault-tolerant SATA RAID 10 arrays on select Intel? 5 Series, 4 Series, 3 Series, 965, 975X, 955X and 945 chipset-based platforms. It provides support for high-performance SATA RAID 0 arrays & redundant SATA RAID 1 arrays on select Intel? 5 Series, 4 Series, 3 Series, 965, 975X, 955X, 945, 925, 915 chipset-based platforms. It also provides AHCI support on select Intel? 5 Series, 4 Series, 3 Series, 965, 975X, 955X, 945, 925 and 915 chipset-based platforms, as well as on Mobile Intel? 915/910 chipset-based platforms.

Note: Intel? RAID Technology requires the Intel? ICH9R/ICH9M-E/ICH10R/PCH-PCH-M SATA RAID controller hub, Intel? 82801HR I/O controller hub (ICH8R), Intel? 631xESB/632xESB I/O controller hub, Intel? 82801GR/GH I/O controller hub (ICH7R/DH), Intel? 82801FR I/O controller hub (ICH6R).

I really don't know what to tell you :(. I can't blame you for being apprehensive.

[Raa]

It should support it, and even if it doesn't, isn't there advanced format to be able to use those drives anyway? (Or something like the old drive overlay loaders we had to use years ago?)

[Shaga]

Update: Bought and installed without any problems

Thanks so much everyone for your time and help!

[Colin.B]

Update: Bought and installed without any problems

Thanks so much everyone for your time and help!

Awesome news! Glad it works for you :)