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I have Intel P4 2.4gz with 512 RAM and OS is WinXp at my Home.
I am planning to buy an portable HDD. I see lots of different sizes ( 256 GB,512 GB etc.)available in the market. I am not sure if my PC will support all the sizes.
Is there is any upper limit for portable HDD size on my PC ?
How/Where can I check it.

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3 Answers

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The only limit is 2.3 TB, beyond which the NTFS file system is exceeded on a 32-bits operating system (Windows 7 64-bits is then recommended). FAT32 is not recommended because of the limitation on file size, except if you wish to avoid the "not able to eject" bug on Vista and later.

So go ahead and buy any portable disk you like. Just ensure that the enclosure of a larger disk has adequate aeration. As most portable disk manufacturers never heard of NTFS, you might need to reformat it before using.

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thanks for your reply:). sorry I cant up-vote due to reputation issue :-) – Hemant Aug 30 '10 at 8:58
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-1: NTFS can go far larger than that (on 32bit OS more than 32bits is used for NTFS sizes and allocations). See serverfault.com/questions/49158/storage-limit-in-windows-2008/… (remember Server 2003 is the server edition of WinXP and has the same limits). Are you thinking of LBA addressing range? – Richard Aug 30 '10 at 9:58
@Richard: The limitation does go deeper than NTFS with 64-bit LBA addressing, which is why you need a 64-bits O/S. But I didn't want to confuse the issue by using too technical terms. – harrymc Aug 30 '10 at 10:49
@harrymc Technet lists no 32bit vs 64bit difference (see the limits listed by MS from the A linked above). Do you have a reference? – Richard Aug 30 '10 at 11:17
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@harrymc: Actually, the article at carltonbale.com says that the 2TB limit only applies to MBR partitioning schemes, not to GPT. And GPT is supported natively in Vista and up. So I don't see how you can claim a general limit of 2 TB for 32bit Windows. – sleske Aug 30 '10 at 23:00
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up vote 2 down vote

I am not aware of any (practical) limit on harddisk size in general. Any drive you can buy should be fine.

However, the filesystem may impose size limitations on the partitions you can create. FAT32 limits partitions to 2 TB (there are extensions, but they're not widely supported). At any rate, it also has a maximum file size of 4GB, so you likely want to format your drive with NTFS, which is recommended anyway. Then you won't have any limitations (max. partition size is 256 TB).

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thanks for your reply:). sorry I cant up-vote due to reputation issue :-) – Hemant Aug 30 '10 at 8:58
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up vote 2 down vote

There is a limit for addressing HDDs with 512 byte sectors somewhat below 3TB (IIRC) due to limitations on the LBA addressing system used to number the sectors.

Larger disks will use 4096 byte sectors, but WinXP needs extra drivers to work with such disks (Vista and later have native support).

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