Checked website of my local brick and mortar store.
See 3, 4, and 6 TB my books available and formated for XP?
I thought XP (32 bit with svce pk 3) couldn’t recognize more than 2 TB ???..Izzy
I’m not sure but I think WD uses some proprietary format settings to make the larger drives work on XP. When Using WD’s tools to format those drive there is an option to use on XP. I don’t know more than that.
Joe
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Thanks! If that is in fact the case, I have to rethink buying one…Izzy
Called WD tech support (pre-purchase).
Was told 2TB limit applies to internal drives connected to the motherboard, not external drives connected via USB.
Was also told that the drives in question were formatted as FAT rather than NTFS. Asked about reformatting to NTFS using XP’s drive manager. Was told it shouldn’t be a problem…Izzy
Called m’soft tech support (figured it was worth a try). They confirmed what WD tech said.
Also went to local library, found Windows XP Inside\out deluxe edition, covering XP with SP2…
Quoting from p747 of that book.
" The maximum partition size for a FAT32 drive created by Windows XP is 32 GB; by contrast , you can create a single NTFS volume of up to 16 terabytes, (16,384 GB) using default settings, andby tweaking cluster sizes, you can ratchet the maximum volume size up to 256 terabytes. "
I think the tech person was wrong about the FAT32 format. Look at the WD site and in the drive specs it says formatted NTFS http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=870#Tab3
Joe
Yeah! I had a feeling that might be wrong, but I figured the important thing was XP’s recognition of the drive capacity (preferably without resorting to proprietary software). Your reply got me thinking, and pointed me in the right direction.
