Maximum PC

I believe I read somewhere Win OS's don't like HD's that are 3 TBs and above. Is this confirmed?? I need to add a slave drive to my build for a total of 5 HD's. Would a 2 TB HD be best?

Heading to bed, but here's a pretty good article that should answer most of your questions...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/e ... rives.html

Great link, thanks.

I'm not booting at all ever from this 3 TB drive so my impression was that I could use it as a slave with no problems?????

What OS are you using? Until MBR and BIOS are completely replaced with GPT and EFI (allowing for native mass storage support in excess of 2.19TB), some vendors offer work arounds in the form of special controller cards (to allow 3TB to be recognized with older OS'es), or software to manage the storage as multiple partitions.

An Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), in the form of a PCI Express add-in card is bundled with certain Western Digital HDD's.

3TB Barracuda XT's come with Seagate's free downloadable DiscWizard software, a rebranded version of Acronis's Disk Director suite that, among other things, enables a Windows XP system to recognize a new 3TB hard drive as multiple partitions (or logical drives) that have a combined total capacity of 3TB.

Well I bought a 2TB Seagate and it wouldn't jive with my motherboard. It has some kind of "auto" function where if you were running a board that was only 1.5g/s it could adapt. They are made to run 3.0g/s. My board couldn't handle the "auto" whatever the drive came with. Had to return it and just got myself a simple WD green drive (only using it for a slave anyway).

My old Biostar mobo had that incompatibility problem with the VIA 8237R southbridge chip. A hard drive jumper fixed the transfer rate to 1.5Gb.

I saw a pic of the jumper making it run 1.5g/s but it didn't come with a jumper and I don't know where to get them.

My board runs 3.0g/s already it just couldn't handle the hardware the drive had in place to "automatically" run at 1.5. I don't know, my next and hopefully final build will be a year from now when the MOBOs are ALL running at 6.0g/s, hopefully they built a faster chip (or a board running multiple chips) a super nice vid card with at least 3gigs installed on it.

I see they made SSD's to fit PCI-E slots to get a hold of that 500Gb/s but it looks as though the SATA 6.0g/s is gonna match it. I also hope future OS's and MOBO's won't have any problem with the 3TB and more hard drives. I like the PCI drives cause they free up a SATA port for another drive.

Right now my computer allows me to surf the net at a very high speed, watch high definiton tv on my 42" HDTV, watch movies and videos on my 26" HDmonitor and allow my father to watch HDTV from my computer to his tv in his living room, all at the same time. So it does EVERYTHING I want it to but once in a while it will hiccuup and needs to be restarted. I believe my next and final rig should be able to all that without any problems and any overheating problems. I run a 230mm fan on top, 3 120mm in front, 2 120mm on back and one 120mm side fan built into the clear plastic.