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I am considering adding a 2Tb SATA 2 hard drive to my machine. My motherboard is ECS KN1 SLI Extreme. It supports SATA2 and the BIOS is Phoenix AwardBIOS v6.00PG. I am running Windows XP SP3.

Will the 2Tb drive be supported in my machine? If not, what is the maximum?

Is there anything else I need to check?

Thanks, Alan

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2 Answers

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You can put any hard drive in, look out for only SATA2 3GB/s drives though as getting a 6GB/s drive will be worthless on your motherboard as you need SATA3.

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Why worthless, it will be backward compatible, you mean a waste? – Moab Jul 3 '11 at 20:33
Yeah I guess a waste then, it won't be worth the money as you can just buy a normal SATA2 drive that will give equal performance. – Sandeep Bansal Jul 3 '11 at 20:44
Thanks, this gives me confidence that it is going to work! – Alan Spark Jul 4 '11 at 7:16
It is working perfectly, so thanks again for your advice. – Alan Spark Jul 16 '11 at 7:45
Glad to hear that, enjoy using your new drive! – Sandeep Bansal Jul 16 '11 at 18:39
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up vote 1 down vote

Windows XP supports a hard drive with a maximum size of 2 TiB. This limitation is due to the MBR partition layout, assuming the disk uses 512b sectors. The limit is increased to 16 TB (approx. 16,000 GB) if it has a 4K sector size. Upgrading to Windows Vista / Windows 7 will alleviate this issue due to their use and support of a GPT over MBR.

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