MS article stating 4TB MBR drive!

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by whitestar_999, Jun 23, 2018.

  1. whitestar_999

    whitestar_999 Registered Member

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    I recently came across this MS article by chance:
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...stalling-using-the-mbr-or-gpt-partition-style
    Now the only way I know of creating 4TB MBR drive is by using 512bits emulation using 3rd party tools but is this what MS is talking about here or is there some new method to make this possible using MS own utilities.
     
  2. oliverjia

    oliverjia Registered Member

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    Likely a typo. I think they meant to say 2TB.
     
  3. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    It certainly looks that way.

    A MBR disk is limited to 2^32 sectors. So if you have 512 byte sectors the maximum disk size is 2^32 * 512 which is 2,199,023,255,552 bytes. That is 2 TiB.

    But what if the sectors are larger? Disks with 4K Native sectors, eight times larger than 512 byte sectors, can have a maximum MBR disk size of 16 TiB. They still have 2^32 sectors.
     
  4. whitestar_999

    whitestar_999 Registered Member

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    But if it was that easy then wouldn't many people be doing this.Even MS article states 4TB MBR which is unusual in light of above because if a 4TB mbr drive is possible by using larger sectors on a 4k native drive then a 8TB or 12TB should be possible too.Is it possible that booting from a 4TB mbr drive requires some specific instructions which might cause issues & hence it is not recommended?
     
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