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Adding a new 4TB drive to a Windows 8.1 "server"


rtech73

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Good evening!  After a death of 2 TB drives (see other post) I have replaced them with a single 4TB drive (the server has 20 drives, so I have plenty of duplication potential).   I've never used a drive this size.   Are there any potential problems I may face by using a 4TB drive?   It will likely be going into an external eSATA enclosure (a T5BM).  I have used up to 3TB before with no issues, but I know that sometimes new thresholds bring new challenges to the surface.

 

Thanks!

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Nope. other than maybe with your controller and enclosure.

 

If you haven't formatted the drive, then when you add it to the pool, StableBit DrivePool will format it as a GPT disk. This has the advantage of supporting both Advanced formatted drives natively, but that it supports ... well up to 16EB volumes (16 MILLION TBs) IIRC.  So, no 2TB limit on volume size!

Otherwise, you can manually initialize and format the disk in Disk Management (run "diskmgmt.msc"). It will prompt you to initialize any uninitialized disks, as soon as it opens.

 

 

 

 

One caveat here, what are you storing on your pool (don't need to answer).

If you're using mostly large files (like videos, ISOs, client backup database, etc), then you may want to manually format the drive and use a higher Allocation Unit size. 

  • The downside to doing so, is that you may end up with more "wasted" space on the disk (as a 1k file will use a full "cluster", even if it's a 64k cluster). This is what we call "slack space", and is counted as part of "Other" on your disks.
  • The upsides:​​
    • Larger contiguous chunks of data, which means potentially faster access
    • less fragmentation (as each chunk is larger, and kept together)

This is entirely personal preference, and not strictly required.

 

 

 

Personally, I have a couple of Seagate Archive (8TB) drives, and ... well, no issues with them.

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In that case, then yes, formatting with the larger allocation unit size may be a very good idea. :)

Hey, thanks for your perspective on this!   Just for good measure, I moved some drives around so that this big drive was inside the main box and not in one of the external enclosures.   Everything worked just fine!   Thanks for the tip!!!

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Totally agreed.  I had a couple of USB enclosures.   Eliminated all of them due those very problems...   I do have two TR5M enclosures connected via eSATA.   Fortunately my server lives in the crawl space basement, and have never had a problem with disconnecting, especially since no one ever comes near the thing except me!

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