Windows 8 to support very large HDDs
Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago
The MSDN blog, more precisely the Building Windows 8 blog, as recently seen the addition of a new article talking about the HDD size support.
The article starts off with a recent IDC market search report in which, as can be seen in the graph below, they estimate that the maximum capacity of a single hard disk will reach 8TB in 2015.
Microsoft, in their quest to integrate support for large HDDs into Windows 8, sees two challenges: the first one is to ensure that the entire available capacity is addressable, and the second is to support the hard disk vendors in their effort to deliver more efficiently managed physical disks- 4K large sector sizes.
Mentioned in the article was the UEFI which has been designed from the ground up to work with large disk drive through the use of the GUID partition table. Thanks to the combination of UEFI firmware, GPI partitioning and LBA, Windows is able to completely address large capacity disks.
To sum up, upon its release, Windows 8 will be able to install and boot from 3TB or larger disks.
The original article, although quite long, is worth the read. For more information you can read it here.
