Does GTR6 really have a 2TB ssd limit per drive?

mscott · Post time 2023-01-15 01:20:46

Does GTR6 really have a 2TB ssd limit per drive? Is this limit the same for the m.2 pcie and m.2 sata port? What creates this limit? Thanks

Cleariati · Post time 2023-01-15 11:56:31

You are actually asking a very complex question. I will try to provide a simple answer. Your primary drive is limited to 2tb because of the type of format MBR or Master Boot Record and UEFI - let's call it a Windows limitation. So, you want to keep your primary boot drive at or below 2TB.

As for a second SSD that you add once again you are limited to 2TB if you format MBR (bootable disk) because of Windows. Convert the SSD to GPT and you should be able to use a 10TB drive assuming there is no built-in hardware limitations in your Beelink PC.

chairman67 · Post time 2023-01-15 21:48:03

Edited by chairman67 at 2023-01-15 22:03

assuming there is no built-in hardware limitations in your Beelink PC.

And how do we know there is no built-in hardware limitation or not? It's either becuase of MBR format (easily fixed by convert to GPT) or it's a hardware limitation.. How do we know which one it is?!

Beelink support needs to answer mscott's question I think !!

Chaperone2275 · Post time 2023-01-19 22:45:10

Cleariati replied at 2023-01-15 11:56
You are actually asking a very complex question. I will try to provide a simple answer. Your primary ...

These machines come with Windows 11 pre-installed, which requires a GPT partition table. There's no MBR on these machines and no 2TB limit.

AGabaldoni · Post time 2023-01-23 23:30:53

NO. The hardware does not have this limitation. The OS could limit you to under 2TB PER PARTITION. You could partition for example a 4Tb drive into two 2 Tb partitions with no problem, I for example have a 4Tb Nvme with a small 537Mb FAT partition (created by Linux as ir is required to boot) and the rest is a 4Tb partition using the Ext4 filesystem.

The limitations you will encounter are:
If you use MBR (Master Boot Record) you are limited to four primary partitions. To have more than four partitions, you could create 3 primary partitions and one extended partition further subdivided into logical partitions.

If you partition your drive with GPT (GUID Partition Table) you can have up to 128 primary partitions and unlimited numbers of logical partitions.

DISK CAPACITY:

MBR drives are limited to a maximum capacity of 2Terabytes
GPT drives can be up to 18 Exabytes. If you have a 3Terabyte or larger drive, you will need to format it using GPT rather than MBR.

MrUnderhill · Post time 2023-02-01 16:42:33

So, I could potentially put in a 10,20 tb hdd... intriguing. Then why do they say these computrers are limited to 2tb? Believe me yopu can be as complicated as you want... There has to be a reason why they say theres a limit...

Chaperone2275 · Post time 2023-02-02 08:14:26

MrUnderhill replied at 2023-02-01 16:42
So, I could potentially put in a 10,20 tb hdd... intriguing. Then why do they say these computrers a ...

Take a look at their replies to questions. The answer is because they have no idea what they're doing.

Cleariati · Post time 2023-02-03 05:42:09

AGabaldoni replied at 2023-01-23 23:30
NO. The hardware does not have this limitation. The OS could limit you to under 2TB PER PARTITION. Y ...

This is the correct answer with a caveat - I believe most of the little pc makers that have this limitation is due to the space in the case. If it only has space for a 7mm drive then that is 2TB and below drive size. Drives over 2TB are thicker and wont fit the space.

I also learned something from the above post, Windows 11 uses GPT partitions for the OS. That will be a huge plus going forward since drives are becoming insanely larger.

MrUnderhill · Post time 2023-02-03 05:42:28

Indeed...