WD 3TB HDD will only format to 2048GB with GPT (IT Professional)

Hey Guys,

New to the Forum's. I am really struggling with getting 3 of my 3TB WD Green HDD's to show up as full capacity. I have already gone through Disk Part with all of them and windows will only read them as 2048GB even in the Bios. They have all been formatted to GPT. This is similar to what happened to another poster 3 years ago here 3TB disk showing as 2TB - Windows 10 Forums

I could use as much help as possible to figure this out as I want to use all 3 drives as a spanned volume and I am losing over 1TB of physical space.

Here is a picture of the Disk Manager to show what I am talking about.

How have you connected them? This 2TB limit for GPT initilised disks tends to be because of the enclosure.

The specifications for DELL T7500 states:

"Hard Drives: Chassis supports up to five internal SATA drives or four SAS drives (10.0 TB maximum storage capacity); Single RAID 0 data volumes greater than 2TB are available as factory-installed option with the optional PERC6 RAID adapter (not supported on Linux operating system) SATA 3.0GB/s 7200RPM SATA 3.0GB/s 10K RPM SAS 15K RPM SSD Up to 2TB with 16MB DataBurst™ Cache Up to 600GB with 16MB DataBurst™ Cache Up to 600GB 256GB Up to 250GB with 8MB DataBurst Cache"

How many internal drives are connected in the System?

Just to check whether the above specs has anything to do with your problem, just connect only one 3TB internal drive (apart from your system drive) and then initialise and format it as a GPT drive. Is the full capacity available now?

I must say that I am just shooting in the dark. Sometimes it may hit the target

Well, This seems to be a MoBo limitation. I have installed a separate PCIe raid card and the drives show up as 3Tb. Even with the latest BIOS, since this is a non UEFI system I will not be able to use any of the on board controllers to get the drives to show up as their full capacity. I was trying to make this a simple system with some drives I was given for photo, video storage since I do timelapse edits and astro photography. Now that I am aware that this is an on board hardware limitation, I will look into purchasing an 8 channel PCIe sata controller. Thank you for all of your help.

robfatts said:

Well, This seems to be a MoBo limitation. I have installed a separate PCIe raid card and the drives show up as 3Tb. Even with the latest BIOS, since this is a non UEFI system I will not be able to use any of the on board controllers to get the drives to show up as their full capacity. I was trying to make this a simple system with some drives I was given for photo, video storage since I do timelapse edits and astro photography. Now that I am aware that this is an on board hardware limitation, I will look into purchasing an 8 channel PCIe sata controller. Thank you for all of your help.

Or get a new motherboard, you're is obviously old if it doesn't support UEFI.

Lol! if you have a dual Xeon motherboard floating around that fits LGA 1366 processors that you're willing to give me that some more up-to-date I will gladly change out my motherboard. however I got the processors and 96 gigs of RAM given to me for free and I bought the tower for $200 so at this point buying another motherboard is not an option. Almost everything that I have in this tower was and hand me down from a previous computer. But I do appreciate your reply as I'm well aware that that would be a solution.

robfatts said:

Lol! if you have a dual Xeon motherboard floating around that fits LGA 1366 processors that you're willing to give me that some more up-to-date I will gladly change out my motherboard. however I got the processors and 96 gigs of RAM given to me for free and I bought the tower for $200 so at this point buying another motherboard is not an option. Almost everything that I have in this tower was and hand me down from a previous computer. But I do appreciate your reply as I'm well aware that that would be a solution.

So you know, my desktop upstairs I use for video editing has this same problem. I went back to a 2TB drive as opposed to all new hardware so I feel your pain.

Ha! Feel the pain for sure. But thanks for the help everyone. Hopefully this sheds some light for other users.

Hi folks

@robfatts

I think the limitation is only if you want to use that HDD as a boot drive - there's no reason at all why the other (non Boot) drives can't be formatted properly

I'd remove also the RAID hardware or disable it -- Consumer Hardware RAID cards are ususally very poor performers.

Another test you can do quickly to see if your mobo will handle the HDD is to download a Linux Live distro on to a USB, boot it and then just format the HDD -- you can re-format it for Windows again later.

Once you've booted up the live distro simply type on the command line (console) this command :

lsblk

the output of that will show you capacities of HDD's amd "The mount point" in the format /dev/sdx ....... where x is the number. If it's say 1 then type mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sd1 and this will run for about 3 secs and show you the capacity - if it's 3TB then you've got something with Windows and UEFI. (If your distro doesn't have xfs then do mkfs.ext4 -f /dev/sd1 - all Linux distros will support ext4 although ageing file system - remember this is just a test though).

Another option is download GPARTED , create a bootable usb with Rufus from the downloaded iso and boot it.

You'll get a GUI much like any standard graphical partition manager but it's Linux based so won't have the windows UEFI limitation. See if you can create a 3TB NTFS partition (GPARTED supports NTFS partitions).

gparted : https://gparted.org/

Rufus : Rufus


Cheers
jimbo