EFI is Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface, and UEFI (United EFI) is the nonproprietary version based on the 1.10 EFI spec. I say “auxiliary” because you can boot Windows from a 3TB drive only if it’s 64-bit Vista or 64-bit Windows 7–and then, only if you have a PC with an EFI/UEFI BIOS. If the BIOS, drivers, I/O card, or operating system in your PC still plays by rules that involve this formula, you’ll have issues installing and using a 3TB drive.įortunately, you can find drivers and utilities that allow you to use a 3TB drive as auxiliary storage with any flavor of Windows, XP or later. In that formula, 2 indicates binary, 32 is the number of bits allowed in a legacy disk address, and 512 is the number of bytes in a legacy hard-drive data block. The problem with deploying 3TB drives relates to older PCs (those more than a few months old, in most cases), and stems from the formula 2^32*512=2,199,023,255,552, or 2.2TB–a hard-drive addressing scheme found in legacy BIOSs and operating systems.
Even if you can work such storage into your system, it may not be in a single 3TB volume, but in a 2.2TB volume and a 800GB volume instead. Now that hard drives have jumped from 2TB to 3TB, however, upgraders face some challenges: These new hard drives may have issues in some drive enclosures and in older PCs, which aren’t prepared to address the entire capacity of a 3TB model. We expect hard-drive capacity to grow over time.
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