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kirkbross

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 6, 2007
666
22
Los Angeles
Can I put four 4TB drives in the drive bays of a 2008 Mac Pro?

I'm trying to understand the concept of "maximum storage." Why does an OS care how big a drive is?
 
Can I put four 4TB drives in the drive bays of a 2008 Mac Pro?

I'm trying to understand the concept of "maximum storage." Why does an OS care how big a drive is?

Should be good and it is not the OS most times that cares rather the firmware of the machine, some manufactures limit that size in there. Now when running a 32bit OS I believe that is where it gets tricky OS wise as they can only address up to a certain size drive. Think the idea is up to 3tb or something like that.
 
4 x 4TB drives inside 2008 Mac Pro

I have this setup in a 2010 - as 2 x 8TB arrays with an accelsior card for booting OSX, running 10.8.5. Works fine. I don't see there being a difference between the earlier and later. Older win doze machines had a 2TB limit but not OSX.
 
The Mac Pro raid card apple card that ships as an option in a 2008 has a 2.2tb drive limit.

Older MS operating systems such as XP can't boot or partition a drive larger than 2tb but can read and write to drives initialised in a newer OS such as 7.
 
The 2TB limit is not a Windows limitation, but rather an MBR limitation. OS X using GPT partitioning, so it is not affected by this limit. This mainly applies to the boot drive and not a data drive.

If you are using GPT partitioning in Windows, you can have a partition greater than 2TB as well.
 
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