What's the difference between MBR and GPT?

Can someone explain or direct me to a site that describes MBR (Master Boot Record)? I'm initializing a new HDD and I'm asked to choose a partition style - MBR or GPT. I always choose MBR, but I'm just want a little more information.

Windows Vista Premium 32bit
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.70GHz
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC
Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X2048-6400 2X1GB DDR2-800
Western Digital 150GB Raptor x2 RAID 0 - OS
Western Digital Raptor - Data
Seagate Cheetah 18GB 15k - Swap
IBM Ultrastar 40GB 15k - Backup
Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro Series
Dell E207WFP & Samsung SyncMaster 213T
Asus Striker Extreme Motherboard
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR
Zalman CNPS9700 NT CPU cooler
Silverstone Temjim TJ07
Pioneer DVR-212D DVD/CD Writer
APC Back-UPS XS 1000
Coolit Beverage Chiller (pride of the system)
Various trick lighting and LEDs

MBR is the standard partitioning scheme that's been used on hard disks since the PC first came out. It supports 4 primary partitions per hard drive, and a maximum partition size of 2TB.

GPT disks are new, and are readable only by Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows Vista (all versions), and Windows XP x64 Edition. The GPT disk itself can support a volume up to 2^64 blocks in length. (For 512-byte blocks, this is 9.44 ZB - zettabytes. 1 ZB is 1 billion terabytes). It can also support theoretically unlimited partitions.

Windows restricts these limits further to 256 TB for a single partition (NTFS limit), and 128 partitions.

Only Itanium systems running Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista systems with an EFI BIOS can boot from a GPT disk. The other operating systems mentioned earlier can use GPT disks as data disks but not boot disks.

For more information on GPT, see Problems with larger than 2TB arrays in the General Storage forum, and see Windows and GPT FAQ for additional information.

Wow! 19 lines of signature for a 1 line post.. And with useless information on it.. (see "Various mods & trick lighting.. coolit beverage chiller... ). Hopefully you dont mention all of your cables you are using..
Now i know that on such forums its good to post our configuration.. but i guess that only the "suspect" parts are needed to be listed.. or maybe you post your config on a single post when you mention your problem.
I have seen that on many forums and think that is really disturbing.. from a reader perspective, plus its huge bandwidth (and storage) eater.
Imagine if all people put their specs in their sig..
Now imagine the number of posts per people (hundreds of ppl) per topic (thousand topics) per forum (million forums....) That all makes a bunch of useless terabytes of data flowing around the net..

cheers

On a thread that's over three years old...

I just had a gpt disk fail. i wont be using this again, my 2TB HDD is going back to mbr

Since this is the storage forum, he's not wasting huge amounts of storage. His sig is 651bytes, he would have to make 1,500 posts to consume 1MB of storage assuming he had no sig as opposed to a shorter one.

General speaking the difference between MBR and GPT could be divided into three parts.
Storage Size: MBR disk support 2TB at most. GPT disk support larger than 2TB disk.
BOOT Support: system on MBR disk could only boot from bios motherboard. System on GPT disk could only boot from EFI or UEFI motherboard.
Partition Configuration: MBR disk could contain at most four primary partitions or three primary partitions with one extended partition. GPT disk has no such kind of limitation.
This is all what I know, hope this could help you.