Initialize new HDD?

[nerrawg]

Hi guys - I think this one will be easy for you,

I just got a new Samsung F3 1TB drive, however after pluging it in to my SATA port it isn't automatically coming up in Win7 Pro. I just re-installed win7 on my SSD boot drive and both it and my old HDD show up under "computer", but the new F3 is missing. I then checked in BIOS and it recognises all 3 drives as being connected. I went back into win7 and under "Computer management" - "Storage" - "Disk Management" I can find all 3 drives with their correct size, however as you probably already have guessed my F3 is "Unallocated" and described:

Disc 2
unknown
931.51 GB
Not Initialized

So my question is do I initialize the disk under the partion stylle MBR (its not supposed to be my boot drive - just an install drive for my game data) or under GPT?

Thanks guys

 

[nerrawg]

Solved problem - going for MBR as this is only a 1TB drive

 

[sminlal]

Good answer - the only reason you'd need to use GPT is for a drive that's larger than 2TB. That's true whether its a boot drive or not.

The issue with boot drives is that most motherboards still don't know how to boot from a GPT-formatted drive. GPT data drives aren't a problem, though, unless you have an older operating system that doesn't understand them.