Upgrading Non-boot drive to 3TB win 7, 64

[waynegman]

I have an i7 920 with Evga x58 le MB with a 1TB boot drive and a 2TBvideo storage drive that needs upgrading to more space.

I understand I need to format the disk with a GPT partition (somehow). I'm trying get a hold of the basics of what I need to know to make a purchase/install of a 3TB drive on my Win 7 64 bit system and get it to see all 3TB.

Questions:
1. Can I just go out and buy the cheapest 7200 RPM 3TB internal drive......I'm thinking yes
2. When I plug that into my win 7 machine it should auto discover the disk. Will I get options
to format it with a GPT partitions. When I look at my install of the current disk all I see for that disk is that it is ntfs
filesystem with the disk defined as "BASIC". Do I need to enable or load anything to be able to implement GPT on
the new 3TB drive.
3. I'm worried that if I don't square away point 2 I'll end up hitting a wall where I only see 2.1 TB of the 3TB system.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Not a problem. GPT is a volume-level (whole drive) format, not a partition-level format. Disk Manager will allow you to initialize the drive, offering a choice of MBR or GPT. Initialize it as GPT, then make a partition, then format it as ntfs.

Why not store some of your data on the 2 TB drive and some on the 3 TB drive instead of "upgrading" the 2 TB drive? That way you have 3 TB of free space instead of one.

 

[waynegman]

yea the projects I have I re-edit them and everything needs to be relative to F: I guess eventually I'll buy and array and have a monster F: the way it is going. Thanks for the info.