what is the max HDD capacity allowed in w10


  1. Posts : 279
    21H1 (OS Build 19043.1081)
       #1

    what is the max HDD capacity allowed in w10


    what is the Max accessible hard drive IE 3x 2TB via USB or 4x 2TB just curious
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  2. Posts : 16,325
    W10Prox64
       #2

    dmesal said:
    what is the Max accessible hard drive IE 3x 2TB via USB or 4x 2TB just curious
    Hi.
    I'm not sure you mean the max size of a hard drive or the max number of drives? For instance, I currently have 2x5TB external HDDs attached to a system. I read somewhere (someone actually did a test) that, as long as Windows has drive letters available to assign to new drives, you can continue adding. But, once it gets to the end of the alphabet, you're at the max you can connect. :)
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  3. Posts : 505
    Windows 10 Pro (Mix of Builds) / Linux Mint
       #3

    From a site discussion on USB Drive capability:

    To answer the subject line, USB's limit is the limit of its mass-storage class (MSC) spec. This spec is in turn based on the SCSI transparent command set. (See alsohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mas...#Device_access). Looking at the SCSI read commands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_Re...s#Read_.286.29) you can see that there are several versions of the API. The oldest supports 21-bit block addresses (and a 1GB limit), a later version supports 32-bit LBAs (imposing the 2TB limit many cases have today), and the latest has a 64-bit LBA which will impose an 8ZB limit (that's 8 giga-terabytes!).

    Modern USB cases will support 64-bit LBAs and should support any drive you're likely to find. Older cases won't support this and will misbehave if they are attached to a drive larger than 2TB.
    Assuming your USB case supports the drive, then there's the issue of partitioning the drive. The MBR partition scheme (used in various forms since MS-DOS) uses a 32-bit block index. So it has a limit of 2TB. The solution used today is to switch to the GUID partition table (GPT) format which uses 64-bit block numbers.
    All modern operating systems (including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) support GUID partition tables and should be able to support a >2TB drive as a data disc.
    If you're a Mac or Linux user, then you should be able to boot from the drive as well. Macs have EFI firmware and support booting GPT volumes. Modern Linux systems have code in the GRUB bootloader that, I'm told, will allow booting Linux from a GUID drive without EFI firmware..
    If you're running Windows, however, you may or may not be able to boot from the drive. You will need EFI firmware on your motherboard, and you will need to be running a 64-bit version of Windows. Microsoft requires both in order to boot from a GPT drive of any size. This means that if you are running 32-bit Windows or have BIOS-only firmware (without EFI), you will want to make sure your boot disk is 2TB or smaller, so you can apply an MBR partition.
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  4. Posts : 1,778
    Windows 10 Pro,
       #4

    On my hardware it doesn't make any difference if I am using Linux or Windows, my max. is 7 x 8 terabyte, not including an NAS system which could be another 1,000 terabytes. I think that this is a hardware based question, not an OS based question.

    I could adjust my hardware to use more, but for now this is adequate.
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  5. Posts : 18,424
    Windows 11 Pro
       #5

    simrick said:
    I read somewhere (someone actually did a test) that, as long as Windows has drive letters available to assign to new drives, you can continue adding. But, once it gets to the end of the alphabet, you're at the max you can connect. :)
    You can add more than 26 drives (and it is actually volumes that get drive letters, not physical drives). When you run out of drive letters you can still map the volumes to folders. For example, you can create a folder "Movies". Then you can map a volume (commonly referred to as a partition) on a physical drive to the "Movies" folder.
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  6. Posts : 17,661
    Windows 10 Pro
       #6

    dmesal said:
    what is the Max accessible hard drive IE 3x 2TB via USB or 4x 2TB just curious
    Using GPT partitioning in Windows operating systems starting from Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, the maximum partition size is 256 TB, theoretical maximum 18 exabytes based on max number of logical blocks on a GPT disk being 2^64, each block being 512 bytes (2^64 * 512).

    Maximum number of partitions on a GPT partitioned disk is 128.

    Kari.
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