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>This was a ceiling. You can't work around the ancient cylinders/heads/sectors-per-track code in the BIOS any more; all the values are maxed out to get 2TB. And

by jaclaz 6y ago

>This was a ceiling. You can't work around the ancient cylinders/heads/sectors-per-track code in the BIOS any more; all the values are maxed out to get 2TB. And the BIOS dictated the structure of the Master Boot Record, meaning this was a hard limit for the PC disk partitioning system. So it had to go. I disagree, it is true (but nor exact as CHS is not used since several years, it is LBA in MBR that has a limit at 2^32-1 sectors, which is roughly 2.2 TB with 512 bytes/sector ), but that limitation is only for boot devices, and the "switch" happened exactly at the same time rotating hard disk boot devices (anyway smaller than the 2.2 TB limit) were replaced by even smaller SSD devices. And for non-boot devices 4 KB sector disks allow BIOS and older, non GPT compliant OS's to get to up to around 17 TB. So UEFI was a terribly implemented solution to a non-existing or very rarely occurring problem.

lproven 6y ago
[Article author] Thanks for the clarification!
- jaclaz 6y ago
  You are welcome. Since you are interested in the matter, the 2.2 TB is not really-really the limit of LBA in the MBR, the actual limit is actually almost double that, if you can accept to have 1 primary partition (or max 3 or 2 primaries max + logical volumes inside extended) within the 2.2 TB limit and a single primary partition starting a few sectors before the limit and extending up to another 2.2 TB [1] (and this would cover both 3 and 4 TB disks, which are still very common). If you prefer, 2.2 TB is the MBR limit for a single partition on disk. [1] there may be other limitations, i.e. in MS operating systems the above works just fine in Windows 7 (and most probably later MS operating systems) but it doesn't work in XP