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High Capacity (2.2TB) Technology Brief
Introduction of High-Capacity Hard Drives
While manufacturers begin introducing the latest generation of high-capacity drives, the industry has been working to resolve known capacity
addressing limitations that date back to original design of the PC. These limitations are caused by 32-bit definitions used for partition size and
logical block addresses (LBA)1. Now that Hitachi and others offer hard drives with capacity greater than () 2.2 Terabytes (TB), users will need
to implement a combination of operating systems, BIOS, drive partition tables, and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) drivers that support 2.2TB in order
to gain trouble-free access to the higher capacities offered. When working in legacy environments, more effort will be required to ensure that all
components are capable of supporting high-capacity drives.
The purpose of this technology brief is to help you understand what is required to successfully choose components that work with high-
capacity drives.
PC Configurations
In a typical PC (see Figure 1: PC Configurations), a drive may be connected as the primary boot drive, or a data drive. A data drive could be a
second internal SATA drive, or an external drive like a USB device. The boot drive will contain the operating system such as Microsoft