Gigabyte "Unlocks" 3TB+ Hard Drives on 32-Bit Systems.

[ShyWriter]

Gigabyte "Unlocks" 3TB+ Hard Drives on 32-Bit Systems.

Gigabyte Unveils "3TB+ Unlock" Utility

[03/28/2011 11:04 PM]

by Anton Shilov

Gigabyte Technology, one of the world's largest makers of mainboards and graphics cards, has announced a new utility, which will help to utilize large hard disk drives on 32-bit systems. At present the utility allows to utilize drives with 3TB and higher capacity on the most advanced mainboards, but eventually it will support all shipping platforms from Gigabyte.

The hard disk drives (HDDs) with higher than 2.19TB capacity have to use 64-bit operating system, new logical block addressing (LBA) standard along with new UEFI (universal extensible firmware interface) replacement for BIOS (basic input-output system) and sometimes 4KB sectors (up from 512 bytes on the vast majority of current drives),. While it is not hard to install a 64-bit operating system onto any more or less new personal computer, changing a mainboard with BIOS onto a mainboard with UEFI (which are not available widely) is a problem for a majority of PC owners and transiting from BIOS to UEFI is a headache for motherboard manufacturers. One of the solutions to make 3TB and similar drives work under 32-bit operating system, or on a PC that does not support UEFI is to utilize a special controller for large-capacity hard disks. Another one is to use special software that lets users to split the large drives into partitions and create virtual drives.

The Gigabyte 3TB+ Unlock Utility allows Gigabyte motherboards without Hybrid EFI to recognize and use unallocated space on new 3TB and larger hard disc drives (HDDs).

The utility lets the user to create a virtual drive with space that exceeds 2.19TB, the maximum amount of storage recognized by 32-bit versions of operating systems, such as Windows XP. The virtual drives are limited to 2048GB, and the user can create up to 128 partitions, as long as there is additional unallocated space on the HDD. 3TB+ Unlock supports both GPT (GUID Partition Table) and MBR (Master Boot Record) partition styles, however with MBR the number of partitions are limited to 8. The utility is similar to the one that Seagate ships along with its 3TB desktop HDD.

The 3TB+ Unlock currently supports new high-end motherboard models based on the Intel X58, Intel 6-series and AMD 8-series chipsets, and is in the process of being ported to older chipset models so that it will support all motherboards that are currently shipping. Even though end-users of mainboards featuring latest core-logic sets will hardly use 32-bit operating systems, far not all modern mainboards support EFI in thus may not support 3TB hard drives, which is why the utility from Gigabyte seems to be a useful one.

The utility is freely available from the utilities page of the official Gigabyte website.

Source: http://www.xbitlabs....it_Systems.html

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Shy

[ThexDarksider]

And back in the day, 3 MB was too much...

[ShyWriter]

And back in the day, 3 MB was too much...

My first Apple hard drive, a SCSI, called The SIDER was 10 MB and cost $800.. I was one of the few BBSes running on an Apple //e with more than duo-disks for program and storage. Ahh; now those were the REALLY sweet days. I also was one of the few running a 8MZ ZipCHIPed 6502 CPU when most Apple ]['s, ][+s, and //e's were running 1.07MH 6502s; also had a 256K RamDISK along with the regular 64K the apple came with; oh yeah; also an 80 column card with lower/UPPERCASE.. The (Original) RainForest BBS ran from 1983-90.. There are other BBSes out there now that took over that name after I quit.

Hmmm.. that was 38 years ago and crystal clear - now what was I going to do 10 minutes aago? Old age sucks but definitely beaats the alternative..

[ThexDarksider]

I do kinda regret I wasn't a part of the first computer era... I remember some of the '90s though. I was born in '94 and got my first computer before Win98 came out. x64? Naw. USB? No way. DSL? Not a chance! Lent a floppy? They'd better return it! Sweet days...