Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Drives 2.2TB or larger can also be supported externally via USB without having to resort
toGPTpartitioning.ThisisaccomplishedwithintheUSBBridgechipsetfirmware,which
can be designed to present 2.2TB or larger drives using 4K sectors instead of the normal
512-byte sectors. USB enclosures or drive docks with this feature can use standard MBR
formatting to allow the drive to be supported in Windows XP with no special software re-
quired.
In summary, to use a 2.2TB or larger drive as an internal secondary/data drive, you need
toformatitusingGPT,andyouneedtorunaGPT-awareOS(VistaSP1orlater).Booting
from such a drive also requires a UEFI BIOS or an enabled UEFI Boot option. You can
useGPT-formattedsecondary/datadriveswithWindowsXPbyinstallingthird-partyGPT
support software such as the Paragon GPT Loader (
www.Paragon-Software.com
)
.
PATA/SATA RAID
RAID
is an acronym for redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) disks and was
designed to improve the fault tolerance and performance of computer storage systems.
RAIDwasdevelopedattheUniversityofCaliforniaatBerkeleyin1987andwasdesigned
sothatagroupofsmaller,lessexpensivedrivescouldbeinterconnectedwithspecialhard-
ware and software to make them appear as a single larger drive to the system. By using
multiple drives to act as one drive, increases in fault tolerance and performance could be
realized.
Initially, RAID was conceived to simply enable all the individual drives in the array to
worktogetherasasingle,largerdrivewiththecombinedstoragespaceofalltheindividu-
al drives, which is called a
JBOD
(Just a Bunch of Disks) configuration. Unfortunately,
if you had four drives connected in a JBOD array acting as one drive, you would be four
