Seagate Extended Capacity Manager
Seagate Extended Capacity Manager lets your operating system
support large size discs with MBR partition style, so then you are able to use
the space beyond 2 TB: this free space will be recognized as a separate disc,
and will be accessible by your operating systems and applications as if it was a
regular physical hard disc. Seagate Extended Capacity Manager wizard will display all hard
discs larger than 2 TB (unallocated or with MBR partition style). You can see,
which disc space is recognized and allocated by Windows - this space is called
Native Capacity in the wizard. The space beyond 2 TB is displayed as Extended Capacity Zone. You can enable Extended Capacity Discs, and once it is done, this space
will be visible by the operating system and ready for disc management
operations. Click Allocate space to see the
possible disc space allocation in the next step. After clicking Apply changes now
button, the Extended Capacity Discs will be emulated on your physical disc. In
case your physical disc is larger than 4 TB and the host operating system does
not support a GPT partition layout, there will be several Extended Capacity
Discs. Note these Extended Capacity Discs are not bootable, and most
properties will be the same as a physical disc's. After allocating the space, you may temporary switch off
Extended Capacity Discs by clicking the corresponding option. This will make
Extended Capacity Discs invisible for Windows Disc Management tools, though the
disc space will remain allocated. To disable Extended Capacity Discs, click Remove partitions from Extended Capacity Zone and then
click Apply changes now button in the next step:
these discs will be removed from your system, and as a result - the disc space
beyond 2 TB will become inaccessible
For computers to recognize drives any larger than 2.19TB, the MBR and the BIOS would have to be replaced. The successor to the MBR is the GUID Partition Table (GPT), which offers 64-bit block addressing, and thus (when 4KB blocks are utilized) a maximum storage size of 9.4 zettabytes (or 9.4 trillion gigabytes). What's supplanting BIOS, which can't read GPT, is the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), which is built on CPU-independent architecture and drivers and offers more flexibility and features outside of the operating system.
Because Windows XP has no support whatsoever for GPT and UEFI, no system running it can natively use any drive with a capacity over 2.19TB. Even if you have a supported OS (Windows Vista, Windows 7, and most flavors of Linux) that recognizes GPT, you won't be able to boot to a drive of that size unless you also have a motherboard running UEFI-something that, as of this writing in late 2010, very few do. All current Intel boards support UEFI, but almost no other major manufacturer has yet followed suit. So, under most circumstances, if you don't have a UEFI motherboard (and you probably don't), you'll have to use your extra-large hard drive for storage only. (There are worse things.)
Finally, your system's SATA controller must also be designed to recognize 4KB blocks. This isn't necessarily a big deal: As we discovered when we reviewed Western Digital's new 3TB Caviar Green hard drive, the company is including with all its above-2.19TB drives a PCI Express x1 Host Bus Adapter that lets Windows use a known driver to communicate with the drive.
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