MBR and 2TB limit?

[amiga78]

Now that 3TB harddrives are becoming cheaper than 2TB ones I feel this question is slowly becoming relevant.

How would You format at 3TB or larger harddrive to work with a DCP, since MBR is, if I understand this correctly, limited to 2TB in total disk size.

[Carsten]

Some servers will not support 3TB drives, not for ingest, not as an internal RAID drive. So, no problem if you use it only for your personal storage. But for transfer to any cinema servers, stay with 2TB max.

- Carsten

[Carsten]

Another addition: The issue is too complex to cover here completely - but it IS possible to partition 3TB drives with MBR partition types, if you use larger sector sizes than 512bytes. However, the whole system - OS, hd interface/bridge (USB, FireWire, etc.) need to support that scheme. So for now, this may be safe on your personal computer, but may not work on other systems/cinema servers. Maybe some people did some testing with 3TB and/or GPT partitions on their servers?

Most DCI server kernels are rather outdated. So I would not expect them to support recent general computer systems/OS features.

- Carsten

[amiga78]

In windows it is possible to "initialize" a 3TB hard-drive with MBR and it will then only allow partitions up to 2TB in total leaving the rest of the drive empty, but I don't know if that will be recognized in a DCI server ether.