Im looking at upgrading one of my hard drives to a Western Digitial 6TB Black. This will not be my mine hard drive. Just music, movies etc… I’m currently using a Asus P5W DH-Deluxe mobo. I believe I have a limit of 2TB per drive that can be used.
My questions is: Can i still use this new drive up to 2TB with my current setup (until i upgrade my pc in 8 months or so?)
If I put this new drive in a new pc will then show 6TB(5.5TB) without formatting?
The BIOS of your motherboard does not support hard drives larger than 2 TB. The hard drive will thus not correctly recognized by the BIOS. But Windows can. Therefore, it is not important whether the BIOS recognizes the hard drive properly.
Very important here is the installed SATA controller drivers under Windows. Older proprietary drivers have a 32-bit LBA limit (maximum 2.2 TB). So also the Intel AHCI driver from the Matrix Storage Manager Series (MSM). The MSM driver has never supports hard drives larger than 2 TB and should not be installed. Use either the standard AHCI driver from Microsoft or an Intel AHCI driver from the Rapid Storage Technology Series version 10.1 (and higher). The RST driver supports the chipset of your motherboard up to version 11.2. Newer RST driver can no longer install. I prefer the standard AHCI driver (if no RAID is used).
Use for setting up the hard disk, the Disk Management of Windows. No other tool. If the hard drive is not recognized correctly in the Disk Management tool (1493 GIB), the installed driver is not suitable. If the hard drive is correctly recognized, GPT must be chosen as partition style. Only then will the full capacity can be utilized.
/Edit
I assume that you use at least Windows Vista as the operating system.
[quote=“rh535, post:3, topic:144176”]
If the proper driver is not on my computer, will it least show 2.2TB limit and able to function?
[/quote]No, it will show 1.46 T(i)B. But the standard AHCI driver (by Microsoft) from Windows Vista/7/8.x/10 can recognize the whole hard drive capacity.
With the tool "Drive Controller Info" you can pretty easy check what for a driver is currently being used. Run the tool and make a screenshot of the program window (use the snipping tool). Place the image in here and then I can tell you if the driver is suitable.
I just see that your motherboard has three different SATA controllers. The OnChip SATA controller from Intel, one from JMicron and one from Silicon Image. I don’t know if the controllers from JMicron and Silicon Image support so large hard disks at all. It’s best to connects the hard drive to a port of the OnChip controller from Intel (see manual). That’s important!
