Datasheet

Introduction of
High-Capacity Hard Drives
While manufacturers begin introducing
the latest generation of high-capacity
drives, the industry has been working
to resolve known capacity addressing
limitations that date back to original
design of the PC. These limitations
are caused by 32-bit denitions used
for sector size and logical block
addresses (LBA)
1
.
Now that hard drives with capacities
greater than or equal to (≥) 2.2 terabytes
are available, users will need to implement
a combination of operating systems,
BIOS, drive partition tables, and HDD
drivers that support >2.2TB in order to
gain trouble-free access to the higher
capacities oered. When working in
legacy environments, more eort will
be required to ensure that all
components are capable of supporting
high-capacity drives.
Check out our on-line tools specically
designed to help you understand our
latest high-capacity products
www.hgst.com/internal-drives/above-2tb
Additional sources
of information:
Mac OS X
Technical Note TN2166
Secrets of the GPT
http://developer.apple.com/librarymac/
#technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html
Microsoft
Windows and GPT FAQ
www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/
storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx
Unied Extensible
Firmware Interface Forum
www.e.org
Preparing for the Big 4TB
Online tools
High-Capacity-Aware Operating
Systems Summary
The following table is a summary of
operating systems support for high-
capacity hard drives. All congurations
assume that partitioning is done using
GPT partition tables (rather than MBR)
Operating System 4TB as Boot Disk 4TB as Data Disk
Microsoft Windows XP (x32) No No
Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 or later x32 No Yes
Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 or later x64 Yes, with EFI Yes
Microsoft Windows 7 (x32) No Yes
Microsoft Windows 7 (x64) Yes, with EFI Yes
Intel-based Mac OS X 10.6+ Yes Yes
Linux UBUNTU 8.04+/SUSE x32, x64 Yes Yes
1
32 bit limitation: 512 byte sectors x 2^32 bits = 2.199 TB