8 TB HDD - W10 makes a meal of it but fixed !!

Hi there

Am trying out an 8TB HDD on a desktop. (Standard Tower model, Intel i5 CPU, Intel HD graphics and with 32 GB DDR3 RAM).

W10 Pro seemed initially to to HATE it -- BIOS on start up showed HDD was present and OK.

However when trying to access it on W10 - kept getting messages GPT error, Partition table error etc. Could not format the HDD.

HDD was perfectly OK - Stand alone Bootable surface test etc showed no hardware errors. I've a few professional stand alone HDD diagnostic test programs (filched over the years when working on various sites !!!!).

Loaded up a "Live" Linux mint distro.
Formatted the HDD no problem to around 7.5 TB as EXT4 file system -- absolutely no prob.

Re-booted up windows -- got the "Un initialized HDD" message - standard when Windows sees a "Foreign File system". Simply re-formatted (Windows made no complaints this time) and the HDD has been fine ever since ( and for a spinner it's mega fast too)..

I know people get a bit worried with large size HDD's but they are much more reliable these days and I'm getting another one so I can have some type of RAID striping for extra protection against failure.

Not sure what the limitation is on typical HDD controllers -- the file system should be more than capable of handling this size HDD as also the power supply -- some of the newer HDD's consume a lot less power than older slower IDE models.

SSD's are fine for OS / data scratch / edit areas, paging and swap -- but for loads of multi-media and file sharers with a few users Spinners are still the only way currently that is remotely affordable -- 8TB SATA cost me EUR 185, a large SSD of this size (if existing) probably would cost the average price of a small house !!!.

Cheers
jimbo

If I might ask, what model Hard Drive?

I have found that factory formatting is questionable these days. I have had a few occasions where I experienced problems like yours, the mosr recent with a 4TB WD MyBook USB drive. After formatting in Windows all was well with it.

I just got a 6TB external seagate with no issues whatsoever. It is a USB 3.0 drive and is very speedy for a spinner! These new drives are in fact quite fast as this one writes on average 160MBps. Cost was only 119$ US. I got a second one as well as you cannot beat the price point!