ace72ace
Zaino, I put that $hit on everything
- 1,242
- 71
I've been building machines for 15+ years now, have a house full of them. Gaming was my primary motivation when I was younger, but now with PS3/Xbox360 providing a much easier route, my enthusiasm has waned. No longer do I read all the hardware review forums etc, and learn about the latest CPU cores, overclocking tweaks, fastest memory & hard drives etc... Just not enough hours in the day.
But now I need to do the 'last' upgrade on my going on 6 yr old PC, a very good for it's day Asus p5b-e, 8gb ram, and a quad core (core 2 duo family) CPU. The single 1TB hard drive isn't going to cut it for HD vid editing, and I really prefer just 1 big C: drive. Of course I could just add extra drive's, there's plenty of room in my ATX Lian-Li case, but as stated, I want just 1 big ass drive.
So I bought a nice Seagate 3TB drive only to find out that I'm most likely out of luck as the mobo chipset I have is so old that it's unlikely to handle anything over 2.2TB because of the lack of EFI/UEFI bios. The final bios update available for my board only addressed being able to 'properly recognize' drives over 1TB, and I haven't been able to find any examples of anyone reporting installing a 2TB+ sized drive on the p5b-e.
So this leads me down the road to plan B, get a hard drive controller card that has drivers I can load on install, and cross my fingers and hope that Win8 can recognize the controller card + the card bios menu (much like your olde fashioned SCSI cards - remember them?!) that will allow me install the OS on a single bootable 3TB partition. I could mount the drive on my existing Win7 install, and use disk management to format it as a 3TB GPT drive and hope that the Win8 installer can recognize and handle it with the help of the aforementioned sata controller card with updated bios and device driver...
So I read through all of this;
http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3TB_hard_drives.html
In a perfect world I could find a post online where someone lists the controller card they used, what driver worked ( the card manufacturer or Windows native), what brand HD ( newer models have their own advanced firmware, esp the hybrid drives that have some flash memory to increase flash performance like the Seagate Momentus - I have 2 already), and how they formatted the drive & partition size & type. So far, not much luck finding such a post, looks like I might have to blaze my own trail.
On the bright side the controller cards are only about 25$ unlike the old SCSI cards that were hundreds of dollars back in the 90s.... So I'd be interested in any and all feedback on this. At least it's a nice to have, and not gotta have, as I can just reformat the existing WD 1TB drive that has win7 on it, and use the 3TB drive as a data drive, but I'd rather have the option of keeping the existing install intact on the 1TB drive and let my sons continue to use it, and I could have my own private install on the 3TB drive.
But now I need to do the 'last' upgrade on my going on 6 yr old PC, a very good for it's day Asus p5b-e, 8gb ram, and a quad core (core 2 duo family) CPU. The single 1TB hard drive isn't going to cut it for HD vid editing, and I really prefer just 1 big C: drive. Of course I could just add extra drive's, there's plenty of room in my ATX Lian-Li case, but as stated, I want just 1 big ass drive.
So I bought a nice Seagate 3TB drive only to find out that I'm most likely out of luck as the mobo chipset I have is so old that it's unlikely to handle anything over 2.2TB because of the lack of EFI/UEFI bios. The final bios update available for my board only addressed being able to 'properly recognize' drives over 1TB, and I haven't been able to find any examples of anyone reporting installing a 2TB+ sized drive on the p5b-e.
So this leads me down the road to plan B, get a hard drive controller card that has drivers I can load on install, and cross my fingers and hope that Win8 can recognize the controller card + the card bios menu (much like your olde fashioned SCSI cards - remember them?!) that will allow me install the OS on a single bootable 3TB partition. I could mount the drive on my existing Win7 install, and use disk management to format it as a 3TB GPT drive and hope that the Win8 installer can recognize and handle it with the help of the aforementioned sata controller card with updated bios and device driver...
So I read through all of this;
http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3TB_hard_drives.html
In a perfect world I could find a post online where someone lists the controller card they used, what driver worked ( the card manufacturer or Windows native), what brand HD ( newer models have their own advanced firmware, esp the hybrid drives that have some flash memory to increase flash performance like the Seagate Momentus - I have 2 already), and how they formatted the drive & partition size & type. So far, not much luck finding such a post, looks like I might have to blaze my own trail.
On the bright side the controller cards are only about 25$ unlike the old SCSI cards that were hundreds of dollars back in the 90s.... So I'd be interested in any and all feedback on this. At least it's a nice to have, and not gotta have, as I can just reformat the existing WD 1TB drive that has win7 on it, and use the 3TB drive as a data drive, but I'd rather have the option of keeping the existing install intact on the 1TB drive and let my sons continue to use it, and I could have my own private install on the 3TB drive.