anyone have a 300gig hard drive in their computer?

I'm wondering how it is installed and configured-

which O.S.?
multiple partitions?
did you need special drivers?
FAT or NTFS?

i have a 300 gig single ntfs partion when i run windows sometimes i have linux on it i have no idea why i got a hardrive this big lol

Going to do that to my next rig as a storage drive (not the primary boot drive). Planning for just a simple straightforward Windows XP + single NTFS partition. Too many drive letters running around, especially with the card readers.

Well, I don't have 300 gig, but I've got a 160 gig, and I've not done a thing to it as far partitioning goes. I just plugged the sucker in and started loading it up.

Twin 320 gig hard drives partitioned into 80 gig seperates, Windows XP Pro.

Bill

I have 400GB western digital. I use NTFS partition with Window XP. I don't want to use it for other OS. I have other HD that run window 2003. I plan to install Linux on 3rd HD.

I have 4 of them in Raid5, NTFS

and i still need more space

Single 300 as my secondary drive 40gb primary no partitons runing win XP home my drive is a Western Digital that came with software so that it will reconise the drive without issue & for backups

I am wondering at the intent of the question, ie do you have one and cant get the full 300Gb etc?

Ask

I think he's contemplating buying one and wants to see if there is anything special (software, precedures) required for it's operation.

partition 1/3 os - 2/3 storage
maxtor 300g sata.
windows Xp sp2
NTFS.
special driver - No.

regards.

bjn70 said:

I'm wondering how it is installed and configured-

which O.S.?
multiple partitions?
did you need special drivers?
FAT or NTFS?

Click to expand...

Aside from your OS your Mobo may have a 137 GB limit if it's not new.

Using more than 137GB could be a problem.

If you are running XP then all you need is SP1 or better.

If you are running Win2k, you need a SP, I think it's SP2, and you need to make a change to the registry.

As was mentioned previously, if you have an old motherboard BIOS, it might need updating. I don't have any problems with my motherboards which are about 3 years old.

I always create multiple partitions. Quicker chkdsk. Quicker defrag. Faster seeks. You could if necessary reformat the OS partition without losing your data, assuming the data is on another partition.

Sub_Umbra said:

Aside from your OS your Mobo may have a 137 GB limit if it's not new.

Click to expand...

I just put a 300Gb Seagate Barracuda into my son's 4 year old Dell Dimension 8200, XP SP2. It was basically a piece of cake (but this was far from my first time fooling with disk drives). I used the CD that came with the drive to copy the old hard drive over to the new so that (after swapping jumpers) we booted on the new guy. As part of the process there was a registry fix (IIRC) automatically done to get around the Gb limit. The other way around such limits is to buy a controller card (like Promise, for example). The two reasons we went with the Seagate are 5 year warranty (main reason) and 16mb cache.

Yes, have it partitioned into 3 sections. Running xp pro, it is set up for ntfs.

I have 2 320GB SATA drives I have setup for Raid 1 (mirror), works very well, single partition, XP pro.

I have an 80 gig primary drive that I had in 3 partitions. 15 for os and 2 35s for storage and such. Filled them up so I added a 320 gig SATA drive. Plugged it in turned on pc added it via PC management in Windows XP no problems. I eneded up using partition magic to resort the size of my first Drive to make it just two partitions. The new 320 is one partition for storage only.

The reason for my question...

My current computer has a 20G drive, partitioned into 4 partitions because that's the way I've been doing it since the days of my 386. But now I've decided I don't want so many partitions, partly because I want to run multiple drives now and partly because I have a lot of drive letters with my 4-in-1 card reader.

I was going to buy a pair of 120G's and set them up as C: and D:, but larger drives are close to the same price, and my DSLR will probably chew up all of that space quickly anyway. I could probably get by with 120G for that use, but also I've considered running a DVR on that same computer which could benefit from all of the space it can get.

When I put in new drives I'll probably switch to XP at the same time. I don't think I want to run NTFS, and I'm not too keen on running additional 3rd party drivers.

As I understand it, to run a big drive you have to have a bios or controller that recognizes the large drive, and you have to have software to partition and format the large drive. I've read that the latest version of MS fdisk and format will go up to 127Gb partitions.

Back in the days of MFM, RLL, ESDI and IDE drives, I knew all about how to get larger drives to work with the computer and the OS. Then when IDE's started getting big, it became more "plug and play" and I didn't keep up with the technology. Now the size of drives has caught up with everyone's wildest dreams of future hard drive sizes so again we're into the world of "tricks" being required to access the full size of the hard drives.

Your motherboard manufacturer should have info on any limitations your bios will have on reading large drives.

I think with XP you have to run NTFS, at least for the drive that will house the OS.

Windows XP with service pack 1 should recognize drives larger than 127gb.

My drive is a Western Digital. It came with a software to format the drive. I think most drive manufactures have downloadable tools that you can use to format their drives.

Have a 300GB drive as the multimedia storage drive for my computer (seperate from my OS and backup drives). Was no problem to set up. Maxblast formatted the drive in about 10 seconds (don't ask me how) and I'm using it under Windows XPSP2. Actually just filled it up yesterday... have to go get a new one now!