PCIe SATA advice required please

mart1981 · 15 Sep 2020

I've hit the limit of 6TB drives with my motherboard although no mention of it in the manual and zero response from the manufacturer.

So I need a PCIe card which will enable a couple of SATA 8TB drives - no RAID. Have tried one today and apparently that had a 4TB limit although not in the details at time of purchase.

Can anyone recommend a PCIe card which will recognize high capacity drives.

Currently running Win10x64 v2004.

Any input appreciated - thanks

bobkn · 15 Sep 2020

You may have a hard time getting a response if most people are like me: no idea that a 4TB or 6TB limit exists for most SATA controllers. Based on the number of views you have gotten without a response, that seems likely.

You'd need to make the disks GPT to get past that 2TB MBR limit, but that obviously is not your issue.

A quick look suggest that there could be issues if your controllers are older than 3Gbps (commonly called SATA 2), but, from your PC specs, that seems unlikely.

Can you show a Disk Management shot of how an 8TB drive shows up?

Sorry that I can't offer positive advice.

Berton · 15 Sep 2020

Haven't heard much about the Shuttle brand motherboards since back in 80486 days when I was building in a shop.

I have 2 x 4TB WD My Book external drives attached via USB 3 and 2 x 2TB NAS drives attached to my Router that can be mapped from any computer on the network.

My question would be if the BIOS allows booting from an Add-in PCIe card but is that desired with the large drives or will they be only for storage? I know there's a 2TB limit for MBR booting but larger is allowed for GPT/UEFI booting but haven't needed to do that yet.

You need to put the model number in your My Computer specs, important as boards don't always have the same features as other boards, even from the same maker.

What’s the Difference Between GPT and MBR When Partitioning a Drive?

mart1981 · 15 Sep 2020

Hi - thanks for the feedback

My Shuttle is the SZ170 R8 v1 with BIOS 2.10. The full spec is listed on their website - Shuttle Global - SZ170R8.

Unfortunately they are not forthcoming re the max HD size supported by the motherboard but as it's running 2 x 6TB drives currently assume that is the limit. Hooking up a 8TB to the motherboard goes unrecognized - hence was looking at the PCIe option.

I currently have an 8TB Drive running in an external caddy USB3.0 and it works fine. Formatted to GPT and not required for booting simply storage. Have tried one PCIe SATA card which recognized an old HD but soon as the 8TB was hooked up well nothing.

Thanks for your help.