Is there limits to how much storage you can plug into your mother board?

[AalexX203]

Hi guys,

 

This may be a dumb question but i read somewhere that my motherboard can only handle 3tb or storage. Generally, do motherboards limit the amount of storage you can have and if so how? Please bear in mind that I don't mean the limitation of sata slots or anything like that. What i mean is if i have 2.5tb and my motherboard can only handle 3tb, supposedly, could i install another tb? 

 

Thanks for your help guys,

 

-Alex.

[CryptoMatt]

i never heard of this before. i guess if you dont have enough sata ports/m.2 then you cant connect anymore hard drives or ssds 

[3 Lions]

Just now, CryptoMatt said:

i guess if you dont have enough sata ports then you cant connect anymore hard drives or ssds 

If it's a more modern board they will come with at least 2 M.2 slots. 

[AalexX203]

Thanks pal. I thought it sounded strange. So really I could put as much storage on my motherboard as i want then. I have available sata ports. That's not a problem.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Generally, no. The only limitation I can think of would be if it only supports legacy partitioning (MBR), in which case you'd be limited to 2TB on each SATA port. Even then, that normally only applies to booting from them, most of the time it's not an issue with data drives that aren't being booted from. 

 

Even if the board doesn't support GPT booting, it shouldn't matter for data drives. In that sense, there's no limit. As SATA drives get bigger, you can connect bigger drives to the board no issue and use all the storage. As far as the board is concerned, the size of the drive doesn't matter, as they use the same interface and available bandwidth. 

[AalexX203]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P. If you would know, does this support more then 2tb?

[Oshino Shinobu]

5 minutes ago, AalexX203 said:

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P. If you would know, does this support more then 2tb?

Yep. That board uses a UEFI BIOS (as opposed to legacy BIOS), which fully supports booting from GPT drives. There's no capacity limit for the board. 

 

The board does say it supports 3TB+ Unlock, which is a tool from Gigabyte to make unallocated space on 3TB+ drives usable. The tool says "new 3TB and larger hard disc drives", so it's clearly from quite a long time ago, back when 3TB drives were new and rare. Maybe it wasn't supported fully in the BIOS at the time the board released, but that's almost certainly been fixed in a BIOS update since then. 

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/276/3tb.html

 

EDIT: actually, upon reading more, that feature is actually to "trick" OSes to see the drive as multiple drives in order to use more than 2TB drives with 32bit OSes like Windows XP, which is the maximum amount of storage they could recognise. It basically creates a virtual drive to allow the OS to recognise and use the extra space over 2TB.

[AalexX203]

Just now, Oshino Shinobu said:

Yep. That board uses a UEFI BIOS (as opposed to legacy BIOS), which fully supports booting from GPT drives. There's no capacity limit for the board. 

 

The board does say it supports 3TB+ Unlock, which is a tool from Gigabyte to make unallocated space on 3TB+ drives usable. The tool says "new 3TB and larger hard disc drives", so it's clearly from quite a long time ago, back when 3TB drives were new and rare. Maybe it wasn't supported fully in the BIOS at the time the board released, but that's almost certainly been fixed in a BIOS update since then. 

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/276/3tb.html

Thanks so much for your help! I read this when buying the board which was some time ago. 

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Yep. That board uses a UEFI BIOS (as opposed to legacy BIOS), which fully supports booting from GPT drives. There's no capacity limit for the board. 

 

The board does say it supports 3TB+ Unlock, which is a tool from Gigabyte to make unallocated space on 3TB+ drives usable. The tool says "new 3TB and larger hard disc drives", so it's clearly from quite a long time ago, back when 3TB drives were new and rare. Maybe it wasn't supported fully in the BIOS at the time the board released, but that's almost certainly been fixed in a BIOS update since then. 

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/276/3tb.html

The 3TB+ unlock is/was for 32-bit operating systems when those were very common installs.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, Lurick said:

The 3TB+ unlock is/was for 32-bit operating systems when those were very common installs.

Yep, just read a bit more on that and edited the post