Hello,
Usually I'm able to answer my own questions by looking at the forums here and other places as well as searching online; but this one seems elude me. I'm going to focus specifically on the Seagate 3TB, 4TB, and 5TB External Backup Plus Hard Drives. When you plug one of these into a USB port, on a XP machine, you will see the entire capacity of the hard drive available to you, as a single partition. No drivers are necessary, not even a reboot and yet it's all there. Now, if you buy a 4TB internal hard drive, you can get DiscWizard software that will make the entire 4TB (or whatever) hard drive available to use, but it will make a 2.1TB partition and make another partition for the rest of the space if you stick it in a XP machine.
There seemed to be a Seagate forum post asking this question some time ago, but Seagate has done away with their forums, because when you click on a link to go to one of these posts, it just redirects you to community.seagate.com and searching from their page yields no results. I have an idea that this has to do with the Advanced Format technology that has allowed the manufacturers to make hard drives with 4k physical sectors, but I'm just guessing. Also, according to Microsoft itself, 4k physical sector hard drives are only supported in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, not even in Windows 7. I was wondering if someone in the community could answer just how these external hard drives then work with Windows XP? As a secondary question, why can't this technique then be used on internal hard drives? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
Usually I'm able to answer my own questions by looking at the forums here and other places as well as searching online; but this one seems elude me. I'm going to focus specifically on the Seagate 3TB, 4TB, and 5TB External Backup Plus Hard Drives. When you plug one of these into a USB port, on a XP machine, you will see the entire capacity of the hard drive available to you, as a single partition. No drivers are necessary, not even a reboot and yet it's all there. Now, if you buy a 4TB internal hard drive, you can get DiscWizard software that will make the entire 4TB (or whatever) hard drive available to use, but it will make a 2.1TB partition and make another partition for the rest of the space if you stick it in a XP machine.
There seemed to be a Seagate forum post asking this question some time ago, but Seagate has done away with their forums, because when you click on a link to go to one of these posts, it just redirects you to community.seagate.com and searching from their page yields no results. I have an idea that this has to do with the Advanced Format technology that has allowed the manufacturers to make hard drives with 4k physical sectors, but I'm just guessing. Also, according to Microsoft itself, 4k physical sector hard drives are only supported in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, not even in Windows 7. I was wondering if someone in the community could answer just how these external hard drives then work with Windows XP? As a secondary question, why can't this technique then be used on internal hard drives? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
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