Old and Lazy as I am, I pose a question: "What advantages in GPT versus MBR format?

[BonzaiDuck]

I guess that's the question. I could "Wiki" and read through the entire explanation. But it's like most of the public over the JFK murder: "Somebody just tell me what really happened!"

PS Advantages other than using drives over 2GB in size. [I notice that Acronis has a feature that allows you to use those drives under WHS-2011 as MBR while using full capacity. Can you trust it? Of course, if we had a drive of a size otherwise requiring GPT, we'd format it as GPT. Wouldn't we?]

 

[hhhd1]

One benefit is that it have 2 copies of the partition table data, one saved at the start of the disk, and one at the end. to possibly protect against sudden partition loss.

I am not sure though if the actual partition data (list of files and sizes) is backed up too or just the parition table, and would like an answer to this.

Another benefit is having unlimited number of partitions, unlike MBR with partition limit of 4.

I will lurk in this thread for more detailed answer hopefully.

 

[XavierMace]

UEFI requires it (at least as far as Windows goes).

 

[Elixer]

With GPT, there is (almost) no limits to the number of partitions on the device.
With MBR, you are limited to 4 primary, or 3 primary and one extended partition which can have virtual partitions, but, you can't boot off of those.
MBR don't support over 2TB devices either.

 

[TheELF]

PS Advantages other than using drives over 2GB in size.

It's Tb (terra) nowadays old man.
()
/s

 

[BonzaiDuck]

It's Tb (terra) nowadays old man.
()
/s

Yes . . . I caught that the second time I made the mistake in as many days.

There was once a time, long long ago, around 1985, when you could buy a Western Digital hard disk with a huge storage capability of 20 MB. I was absolutely elated with this massive storage capacity . . . at the time . . .

Some chucklehead in some other forum confused me over at least my accurate understanding of MBR capacity limits, saying that it was 3TB. But I believe it's 2. And probably no difficulty there, since -- if I buy myself a 3TB HDD for $90 and change, format it as GPT, I don't need to worry about whether it's bootable, since that isn't my current plan.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Note the 2 TB limit for MBR is only at the default sector size of Windows, if you increase the sector size MBR can support larger than 2 TB partitions. GPT is more resilient than MBR, which is it's main advantage.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Note the 2 TB limit for MBR is only at the default sector size of Windows, if you increase the sector size MBR can support larger than 2 TB partitions. GPT is more resilient than MBR, which is it's main advantage.

It shouldn't be a problem for me if Windows manages the different formats equally well without missing a lick. And that's the way it should be . . .

I want larger disks for storage; I don't need them as boot disks.

 

[TheELF]

There was once a time, long long ago, around 1985, when you could buy a Western Digital hard disk with a huge storage capability of 20 MB. I was absolutely elated with this massive storage capacity . . . at the time . . .

I bought myself a whopping 512 kb memory expansion for my amiga 500 once...yeah ,I'm old too.
Never could have afforded the 20mb HDD when they came out.

 

[Coup27]

Windows secure boot only works with UEFI and thus GPT.

 

[mv2devnull]

Note the 2 TB limit for MBR is only at the default sector size of Windows, if you increase the sector size MBR can support larger than 2 TB partitions.

How do you increase that?

Drives have physical sector size that they use internally, and logical sector (LBA) size that they show to to outsiders. The partition table uses logical sectors.

If the drive uses 512 byte LBA's, then there is nothing that you can do.

If the drive uses 4k LBA's, then there is nothing that you need to do, but ...
if your BIOS/UEFI, OS and disk utilities do not support native 4k LBA's, then the drive is unusable.

External USB drives can show 4k LBA's. They are usually prepartitioned (MBR) and with already initialized filesystem.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

How do you increase that?

Drives have physical sector size that they use internally, and logical sector (LBA) size that they show to to outsiders. The partition table uses logical sectors.

If the drive uses 512 byte LBA's, then there is nothing that you can do.

If the drive uses 4k LBA's, then there is nothing that you need to do, but ...
if your BIOS/UEFI, OS and disk utilities do not support native 4k LBA's, then the drive is unusable.

External USB drives can show 4k LBA's. They are usually prepartitioned (MBR) and with already initialized filesystem.

True Image has a feature that allows you to use the remaining capacity after creating a 2TB partition. I just hadn't looked into it, because it would mean relying on another piece of software.

For Windows 7 SP1 through 10, either the service pack or some update to it allowed for GPT partitions, and of course for 8.x through 10, it's an entirely native feature.

I had approached the possibility of using more than 2TB HDDs cautiously, because I didn't need that kind of capacity, and still probably don't. But the prices have come down. My server has 4x 2TB in the drive pool, and still has between 70% unused space for the total.

Personally, I occasionally see people who buy these large-capacity HDDs to use as boot disks, and it doesn't make sense to me. If I want to keep a boot disk of 500GB less than 60% full, I just install new software to use a "Program files" directory on an auxiliary SSD or HDD.

With existing SSD speed and prices, I won't bother with RAID because of AHCI speed. If I want a model for building PCs to my taste, local storage would consist of 1 or 2 SSDs and a single HDD. One system I have has a single boot-system 500GB SSD, and a second 60GB SSD which caches the HDD without proprietary software. All the drives are cached to RAM, using about 4GB of the latter.

So I'm flirting with a 3TB HDD at a $90 price-tag. The SSD-caching takes a workload burden off the HDD, so I'd feel comfortable with a WD Blue drive as opposed to their Black drives -- which I had always preferred.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So I'm flirting with a 3TB HDD at a $90 price-tag. The SSD-caching takes a workload burden off the HDD, so I'd feel comfortable with a WD Blue drive as opposed to their Black drives -- which I had always preferred.

If you're looking at a 3TB WD Blue (formerly Green), I would look at a Toshiba P300 retail-boxed 3TB 7200RPM drive for $90 or less on sale.

 

[grimpr]

Robustness and resiliency, i wouldn't trust to MBR my data, the risk of losing the partition table is high. All my hard disks are GPT with 64k NTFS clustersize for performance and less fragmentation and they will stay that way.

 

[grimpr]

So I'm flirting with a 3TB HDD at a price-tag. The SSD-caching takes a workload burden off the HDD, so I'd feel comfortable with a WD Blue drive as opposed to their Black drives -- which I had always preferred.

They are the best value for the price, i sold 2x 1TB WD Blacks and got a single 3TB WD Blue drive, formatted it as GPT with 64K NTFS cluster size which is perfect for the capacity, works fine in my drivepool server.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

They are the best value for the price, i sold 2x 1TB WD Blacks and got a single 3TB WD Blue drive, formatted it as GPT with 64K NTFS cluster size which is perfect for the capacity, works fine in my drivepool server.

Did you have to choose the cluster-size manually? How did you arrive at that figure of 64K?

I might merge two such disks into my existing server, move existing duplicated pool data onto the two drives as a separate pool, then dismount the separate pool and mount it in a new server waiting for large storage drives.

I'm also thinking that for a dual-boot workstation system, I could split a 3TB drive into 1.5TB volumes and one for each OS, replace my SSD-caching-drive with a larger 120GB unit and split the cache between the two volumes of each and both OSes. I think I could even cache such a pair of volumes with a 256GB drive, giving me 120GB for each OS when running.