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The internal SATA hard drives have a limit on a lot of motherboards of 2TB and if I want to get a 3TB HDD then I need to connect it using a PCI card (or get a new motherboard).

But I wanted to ask: If I connect a 3TB harddrive to a external USB enclosure, will it work? The Vantec enclosure I want to buy says it supports up to 3TB HDD but I want to make sure.

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There is always a size limit. Period. The addressing space of your computer is the limit. It varies depending on your hardware and software, but there is always a limit. Your onboard USB controller probably has the same address size as your onboard SATA controller. – bahamat Jul 9 '11 at 17:18
yeah there is a limit sure but i am asking if a 3TB hdd in usb enclosure will work in a pc where this same harddisk wont work while connected to sata, also if this limit is like 500TB it wont matter cause we wont see such harddisks in the next 10 years. – Karim Jul 9 '11 at 20:17
Like I said, if they're both onboard controllers then they will likely have the same limit. – bahamat Jul 9 '11 at 22:01
@bahamat: not Necessarly , sata and usb are different things. please read the answer of KCotreau – Karim Jul 9 '11 at 22:59
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It will really come down to your motherboard, but most of the issues you are worried about relate to directly-connected SATA drives, which use a SATA driver, not a USB driver as in your case. These SATA issues are being addressed in newer motherboards.

Doing a search, I could not find one person, who had problems with a 3TB external drive, but of course, I cannot say 100% since I do not have your specific hardware to test. This is interesting as a general paper (Note number 10, which is directly relevant to your question).

You might want to create a couple of partitions <2TB, or you can create GPT partitions >2TB. Select the largest block size you can when formatting, as there are known issues with some programs, like Windows Backup and small block sizes. With that much space, you may lose a little, but not much relatively speaking.

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cool asnwer, didnt know there is a software issue with >2TB partitions :) – Karim Jul 9 '11 at 20:18
well it seems that >2TB dont work on windows xp 32 so well this is another problem i am facing :( – Karim Jul 9 '11 at 20:20
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The 2TB issue is mainly with computers that need to boot from a large drive as the BIOS has problems understanding them. Even without a card or extra addon, using a standard lower drive for boot and a 2+TB drive for data works fine (at least the few times I have tried).

USB to SATA enclosures usually just emulate a hard drive controller. Some of the older ones were very rough and had a few issues, but with any recent one, I don't think you will have any issues what so ever.

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