Thread: Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB

Since posting my Caviar Green 2TB review, I figured we would be wrapped up on Western Digital drives for a short while. Hitting 2TB is a cute major landmark, and I would suppose hard drives to hang out at that capability, since passing the 2TB obstacle is a difficult suggestion. Drives with bigger than 2^32 sectors (4,294,967,296 for those counting) need formerly alternative means to be correctly read by the operating system. Windows XP (32) is incompetent of understanding past the 2TB mark. RAID cards vendors have all sorts of guides for sneaking past 2TB. 32 bit XP can pull it off with a bit of trickery in the form of changing the sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes. This works, but it is very finicky, as well as breaks many of the tools meant to access a device at the sector level.

Luckily, a light number of us are touching to more present operating systems. I'd bet at least some of us are by now downloading the new Windows 7 Release Candidate while reading this very article. Using larger capacity drives is a non-event under these newer systems, as they can speak the correct 48-bit LBA language necessary for bigger devices, and GPT is already in place to maintain partition sizes more than the old MFT limit of 2TB. NTFS can hit 16 TiB with the default cluster size and 256 TiB if cluster size is enlarged to 64K. LBA48 can maintain up to 144 Petabytes (144,000,000 gigabytes for those without sufficient fingers and toes remaining to figure it out). That said; there are still a fair number of people out there running 32 bit XP, and I guess at least a brief pause in capability amplify while the rest of the world catches up with Kryder's Law.

So, when I focus on the back of SSD goodness, through our Western Digital a couple of their new RE4 - GP Series hard drive for review. I work up the sleeves.