Difference between MBR and GPT?

amir786_z · May 2, 2015

Hi there guys. Can someone explain what's the difference between MBR and GPT?

Samppa221 · May 2, 2015

Hi there guys. Can someone explain what's the difference between MBR and GPT?

http://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/

ThE_MarD · May 2, 2015

Heyyo,

Long-story-short? GPT supports bigger hard drives and is built to function with UEFI motherboards. MBR is the old fashion method of hard drive partition tables and is more compatible on older hardware and operating systems that uses a good ol' fashioned BIOS.

So essentially?

Massive Drive? GPT.

UEFI motherboard? GPT.

BIOS motherboard? MBR.

You won't notice any performance difference. It's pretty minimal on that front.

Me? I have a Gigabyte Z68-UD7-B3 motherboard... it's at that odd point before UEFI was finalized and BIOS was still the king... so it's a BIOS with an EFI side-loader... so mine is kind of like both. Compatible with EFI but doesn't have the boot time benefits.

I do EFI + GPT because I'm cutting-edge like that hahaha... I have no reason to do it performance-wise, but it was still fun to setup. Oddly? My motherboard only supported EFI via a DVD drive... USB drives could only load a BIOS image. Odd eh? Meh, odd time to buy a motherboard anyways hahaha.