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>2TiB external USB drive and WinXP? Of course!


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29 minutes ago, SamirD said:

I think the enclosures cover multiple sizes since after 2TB, the next logical limit is 16TB.  I'm going to try it with a 18TB drive I recently obtained, but I don't know what the original drive was in any of the enclosures I got from others.  I know mine that I bought and reformatted 4kn are 14TB easystore.  The 8TB and 6TB were also easystore enclosures and the 8TB is a Red and the 6TB is a black.  The 18TB I'm going to try is also going to be an easystore enclosure and this drive is a WD/HGST datacenter drive, which last time when I tried a 10TB HGST version of this drive, it would not change to 4kn.  It will be interesting to see if the 18TB will allow me to use 4kn and if so, to make 2x MBR partitions to use the whole space or if it will simply be limited to 16TB.  Either way I'll hopefully remember to post my results here. :)

I guess that the 18TB will get limited to 16TB,The WDD formatter normally just creates & formats one partition.I need again to migrate my stuff from a 6TB to a new probably a 16TB WD Red Pro, but have only the controller from a 14TB EasyStore,so if it will cover all sizes then it will be good, however I can't verify that right now.It would be a good idea,if you are able to test the 14TB controller on the 18TB drive and what you see in the WD Formatter.

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2 minutes ago, Comos said:

I guess that the 18TB will get limited to 16TB,The WDD formatter normally just creates & formats one partition.I need again to migrate my stuff from a 6TB to a new probably a 16TB WD Red Pro, but have only the controller from a 14TB EasyStore,so if it will cover all sizes then it will be good, however I can't verify that right now.It would be a good idea,if you are able to test the 14TB controller on the 18TB drive and what you see in the WD Formatter.

The controller is only translating from what I can tell because the 'format' is very quick for such a large size drive.  And it's important to note that not all drives will format to 4kn.  The HGST 10TB I was almost sure would work, but it didn't.  And I was thinking the 6TB black wouldn't because that's basically an enterprise drive too, but it did.  And ime this is more a function of the drive versus the easystore or the controller, so I think if you got a 16TB drive and paired it with your 14TB enclosure it would work fine, but may not work 4kn because of the drive, not the enclosure/controller.  Yep, I'll try the 18TB with WD formatter and see what it shows and can do.  I don't expect it to work though as the drive is a bit of an oddball--an enterprise drive that is out of market but still covered under US warranty.  It's this drive for those that are curious:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/0F38459/

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14 minutes ago, SamirD said:

The controller is only translating from what I can tell because the 'format' is very quick for such a large size drive.  And it's important to note that not all drives will format to 4kn.  The HGST 10TB I was almost sure would work, but it didn't.  And I was thinking the 6TB black wouldn't because that's basically an enterprise drive too, but it did.  And ime this is more a function of the drive versus the easystore or the controller, so I think if you got a 16TB drive and paired it with your 14TB enclosure it would work fine, but may not work 4kn because of the drive, not the enclosure/controller.  Yep, I'll try the 18TB with WD formatter and see what it shows and can do.  I don't expect it to work though as the drive is a bit of an oddball--an enterprise drive that is out of market but still covered under US warranty.  It's this drive for those that are curious:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/0F38459/

Currently my 14TB WD Red Plus works fine with a 14TB Easystore enclousure so I assmue the 16TB WD Red Pro should aswell.The Easystore enclousure does not have encryption like the My Book has and My Book works only with supplied drives which have a differnt FW due to the encryption.Example an enclousure from a 14TB My Book didn't work with the 14TB WD Red Plus.The WD formatter is just creating/aligning the partition + quick format.All these WD drives support Advanced Format,so they are 4kn, but the controller is behaving 512e for the OS.A principle is shown in the AF White Paper, figure 2:

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/white-paper/white-paper-advanced-format.pdf

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1 hour ago, Comos said:

Currently my 14TB WD Red Plus works fine with a 14TB Easystore enclousure so I assmue the 16TB WD Red Pro should aswell.The Easystore enclousure does not have encryption like the My Book has and My Book works only with supplied drives which have a differnt FW due to the encryption.Example an enclousure from a 14TB My Book didn't work with the 14TB WD Red Plus.The WD formatter is just creating/aligning the partition + quick format.All these WD drives support Advanced Format,so they are 4kn, but the controller is behaving 512e for the OS.A principle is shown in the AF White Paper, figure 2:

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/white-paper/white-paper-advanced-format.pdf

I wouldn't assume that since the Red Pro is a closer cousin to the HGST/WD enterprise drives like the 10TB one that I tried that did not work.

The WD formatter is doing more than just creating and aligning the partition as these drives while are 4kn report 512e unless changed by the WD formatter (or by other means for drives that are removed from their enclosure aka 'shucking').  But formatting outside of the enclosure has its issues as I'm working on helping a friend with several drives that are reporting as 'locked' after a 4kn format gone wrong.

The ultimate confirmation of this would be to format a drive to 4kn inside the easystore enclosure and then remove the drive and connect directly and see if the drive is still 4kn.  My hunch is that it would not be and would instead report 512e (as it normally would).

 

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22 minutes ago, SamirD said:

I wouldn't assume that since the Red Pro is a closer cousin to the HGST/WD enterprise drives like the 10TB one that I tried that did not work.

The WD formatter is doing more than just creating and aligning the partition as these drives while are 4kn report 512e unless changed by the WD formatter (or by other means for drives that are removed from their enclosure aka 'shucking').  But formatting outside of the enclosure has its issues as I'm working on helping a friend with several drives that are reporting as 'locked' after a 4kn format gone wrong.

The ultimate confirmation of this would be to format a drive to 4kn inside the easystore enclosure and then remove the drive and connect directly and see if the drive is still 4kn.  My hunch is that it would not be and would instead report 512e (as it normally would).

 

I forgot to add, yes WD Formatter does a bit more,it sends probably a SCSI over USB command to the controller to switch to the 512e.Not sure if the drive is permanently switched or the controller does that automatically during power up all the time.

However when I played with my 2TB WD My Book almost 10 years ago I made a hex dump of the boot sector and it was 4Kn,so that proved that the drive itself was 4Kn.You can check the post, it's still here.

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1 hour ago, Comos said:

I forgot to add, yes WD Formatter does a bit more,it sends probably a SCSI over USB command to the controller to switch to the 512e.Not sure if the drive is permanently switched or the controller does that automatically during power up all the time.

However when I played with my 2TB WD My Book almost 10 years ago I made a hex dump of the boot sector and it was 4Kn,so that proved that the drive itself was 4Kn.You can check the post, it's still here.

Could be a scsi to usb to change it on the drive, but that would take more time ime than the quick format that it does, so I'm thinking it is some sort of cooperation between the controller and the drive that's saved on the controller or the drive in a non-user data area.

Oh yeah, most drives today are all 4kn/512e.  Very rare to find even 1 and 2TB drives today that are 512n.

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  • 8 months later...
On 9/14/2012 at 6:47 PM, dencorso said:

I have an External USB 2.0 Seagate Expansion 1500 GB, which works. So we know for sure that unpatched 9x/ME can work with up to 1.5 TB, but not as a single partition. For partitions larger than 1TB or HDDs over 2TB, according to RLoew, patching is needed.

Sorry to bump such an old post, I never read this topic before and just wanted to say that I have been using, since years now and without any problem, many 2TB drives formated as a single primary partition to the full drive size in FAT32 and plugged in USB docking stations on Windows ME without any patch to the OS.

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  • 2 months later...
On 9/23/2022 at 4:26 PM, loblo said:

Sorry to bump such an old post, I never read this topic before and just wanted to say that I have been using, since years now and without any problem, many 2TB drives formated as a single primary partition to the full drive size in FAT32 and plugged in USB docking stations on Windows ME without any patch to the OS.

I have myself never tried the max 2TB FAT32 limit on my Win98SE, only 500GB, so hard to say what could be a difference compared to Win98SE. Sadly RLoew won't tell us more.

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4 hours ago, Comos said:

I have myself never tried the max 2TB FAT32 limit on my Win98SE, only 500GB, so hard to say what could be a difference compared to Win98SE. Sadly RLoew won't tell us more.

I've used 2TB FAT32s with win98se and it works although it takes quite a bit of time to read the fat and set up the drive access.

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On 11/24/2022 at 7:54 PM, SamirD said:

I've used 2TB FAT32s with win98se and it works although it takes quite a bit of time to read the fat and set up the drive access.

BTW had you the luck to try a bigger HDD than 14TB with the WD Formatter? :) Im thinking now to get a 16TB WD drive...hope it will work.

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