If you were looking for a reason to move to 64-bit Windows 7, here it is–courtesy of a not so subtle (or particularly gracious) invitation from the industry giant.įortunately, you can find drivers and utilities that allow you to use a 3TB drive as auxiliary storage with any flavor of Windows, XP or later. Microsoft even omitted support from 64-bit XP. The company chose not to implement support for anything larger than 2.2TB drives in any of its 32-bit consumer operating systems–including Windows 7. In truth, most vendors did–with the notable exception of Microsoft. This situation could have been avoided if the entire computer industry had future-proofed after enduring the 137GB (28-bit) limit problems that cropped up around the turn of the millennium. If the BIOS, drivers, I/O card, or operating system in your PC still plays by rules that involve this formula, you’ll have issues installing and using a 3TB drive. In that formula, 2 indicates binary, 32 is the number of bits allowed in a legacy disk address, and 512 is the number of bytes in a legacy hard-drive data block. The problem with deploying 3TB drives relates to older PCs (those more than a few months old, in most cases), and stems from the formula 2^32*512=2,199,023,255,552, or 2.2TB–a hard-drive addressing scheme found in legacy BIOSs and operating systems. Even if you can work such storage into your system, it may not be in a single 3TB volume, but in a 2.2TB volume and a 800GB volume instead. Now that hard drives have jumped from 2TB to 3TB, however, upgraders face some challenges: These new hard drives may have issues in some drive enclosures and in older PCs, which aren’t prepared to address the entire capacity of a 3TB model. We expect hard-drive capacity to grow over time.