![wd my book 3tb sata controller wd my book 3tb sata controller](https://www.dive-computer.de/media/image/b6/03/c7/30efrx.jpg)
- #WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER HOW TO#
- #WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER MAC OS X#
- #WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER DRIVERS#
- #WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER PRO#
- #WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER PC#
So I don't think this was meant to be the market launch.
![wd my book 3tb sata controller wd my book 3tb sata controller](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0577/7371/9758/products/wd-blue-3d-nand-sata-ssd---250gb-01_large.jpg)
#WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER PRO#
I popped one into a Nehalem Mac Pro and I confirmed it worked: Intel Macs already ship with EFI support so these drives should just work in a Mac.
#WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER DRIVERS#
I had to rely on the drivers that ship with Windows 7. The HighPoint adapter uses a Marvell 88SE9025 6Gbps SATA controller, although for some reason installing HighPoint’s drivers on the card (both at boot and under Windows) would cause the drive to disappear entirely. Western Digital expects that we’ll see both motherboard and storage controller support by Q2 2011, at which point it will stop shipping the HighPoint cards with 3TB drives. But as I just mentioned, proper EFI support is tough to come by. The controller supports booting to a 3TB formatted drive if your motherboard has EFI support. In order to deal with all of the potential controller issues today, Western Digital bundles all 3TB drives with a HighPoint Rocket 620. Running your ICH in Native IDE mode will work however.ĪMD’s 8-series storage drivers do support 64-bit LBAs but I haven’t seen any AMD motherboards with EFI support. Currently Intel’s storage drivers don’t support 64-bit LBAs. You SATA controller also needs to support 64-bit LBAs. Users of older boards may be out of luck as enabling EFI is still a low priority for most manufacturers.īIOS support is only part of the problem. Although consumers shouldn’t expect good support from motherboard makers until the first half of next year. I’m expecting to see the first round of motherboards with official 3TB HDD support in the coming weeks.
#WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER PC#
Most PC motherboards however do not have EFI support, and those that do may have bugs associated with the implementation. Intel based Macs don’t use a BIOS and instead have an EFI which allows them to boot to GPT drives.
![wd my book 3tb sata controller wd my book 3tb sata controller](https://www.allhdd.com/images/detailed/782/Western_Digitlal_WD3000FYYZ_n7gd-bv.jpg)
GPT is however supported by systems that implement the successor to the BIOS: Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). Your BIOS does not support booting to GPT drives.
![wd my book 3tb sata controller wd my book 3tb sata controller](https://www.westerndigital.com/content/dam/store/en-us/assets/products/desktop/my-book-usb-3-0-hdd/gallery/my-book-new-left-top.png)
I just mentioned that your PC’s BIOS looks at LBA 0 for the MBR. In order to boot to a GPT partition, you need hardware support. You’ll note that I said data and not boot drives. Below we have some screenshots of creating a GPT drive in Windows and OS X:
#WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER MAC OS X#
GPT drives are supported as data drives in all 圆4 versions of Windows as well as Mac OS X and Linux. With 64-bit LBAs the largest 512-byte sector drive we can address is 9.4ZB (Zettabytes - 10^21 or 2^70 bytes depending on if you’re counting in base 10 or 2). In use on all Itanium and Intel based Macs (among other systems) is GPT (GUID Partition Table), and a feature of GPT is 64-bit LBA support. Either way, with a 3TB drive there’s no way we’re getting a single 3TB partition using MBR. Hard drive manufacturers define 1TB as 1 trillion bytes. Each LBA on a hard drive corresponds to a 512-byte sector value (even on 4K advance format drives, they still appear as 512-byte sector drives to the OS), so the largest partition you can have in a MBR partitioned drive is 4294967296 * 512-bytes or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes. Now LBAs under MBR partitions are addressed using 32-bit values, the maximum of which is 2^32 or 4294967296.
#WD MY BOOK 3TB SATA CONTROLLER HOW TO#
LBA 0 contains the Master Boot Record (MBR) and your BIOS looks at the contents of LBA 0 to determine how to boot. Master Boot Record partitioning is by far the most common on PCs today. The number of LBAs you can address is a function of your hardware and the style of partition you’ve applied to your drive. You start at LBA 0 and you go all the way up to the last address in your device. Storage is addressed linearly, regardless of how the hardware itself is accessed. Pretty much all HDDs (and SSDs) are addressed using a scheme called Logical Block Addressing (LBA). I addressed this in my 3TB Seagate review back in August, so much of this is a rehash from the review back then with some new information toward the end of the page.