Windows 7 and a 2Tb hard drive

[VHG]

I recently bought an Acer desktop PC from eBuyer. It came with core i3 and a 500Gb hard drive, but no operating system.

I have now installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on the 500Gb hard drive and it works fine.

I have a Western Digital 2Tb hard drive (WD20EARS) - never been used - that I want to put in the case as a second hard drive (with W7 still on the 500Gb).

Largest drive I have ever used is 1Tb, but I have heard there can be problems with 2Tb drives (problems formatting or problems of it not being recognized).

Do I have to do anything special with the 2Tb drive or will W7 happily format it and recognize it as a full 2Tb drive?

[scotman]

I don't know the answer to your question but 2Tb as one drive seems very large. Do you need this? How about 2x1Tb.

[VHG]

I already have the 2Tb drive so want to use it. There is only room for one extra drive in the PC case.

I got it "free" when I bought a NAS drive a year or so back (special offer) but the NAS drive had only just started supporting 2Tb drives so I put a 1Tb drive in it instead just to be safe.

I already have about 750Gb of data backed up (years of computer work) so need to look at hard disks larger than 1Tb.

Note Western Digital now have a 3Tb drive available.

[ABerrant]

I believe the critical capacity limit is 2.199TB, at which point boot drives require an EFI BIOS, GPT (GUID partition table) and drivers...

http://www.hitachigst...nal-drives/above-2tb/
http://www.seagate.co...s/support/beyond-2tb/

...and data drives require GPT and drivers...

http://blog.lewan.com...using-gpt-type-disks/

[Old_Geezer]

Just realised I've not got my 2T connected at the moment. It's in an external caddy (somewhere) and was used when I was trying to recover another drive that had 'gone down'. Seem to recall I had no problem partitioning and using it.