Linux – 3TB SATA hard drives into an old Linux system

grubhard drivelinuxsata

I have a 3 year old PC with 4 internal SATA ports. My old SATA hard drives, all smaller than 2TB, work fine. If I buy a 3TB SATA hard drive, will it work in Linux? Will Linux with GRUB be able boot from such a hard drive without a BIOS upgrade? With a BIOS upgrade? It's fine for me to upgrade my Linux to the newest kernel.

FYI I'm already using a 3TB hard drive in an external enclosure, connected it via e-SATA to the computer with a SATA II controller. It works perfectly on Linux. Linux also recognizes the larger sector size (4 KB) automatically. I'm not booting from it though, and I haven't added any partitions: I've created one huge filesystem on it (directly on the device).

Best Answer

I don't see how a BIOS upgrade is relevant, though a BIOS update from the the mainboard vendor could be of relevance if it were to address a problem with the SATA controller. Chances are it doesn't and the only thing that will matter at this point is, does your motherboard have a SATA-II controller? That will determine if a drive larger than 2GB will be accessible. If not you can always buy a new SATA controller as opposed to a new motherboard.

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