The Greater than 3 Terabyte Hard Drive

[XPostFacto]

I'm supposed to be building a new PC for a friend just as soon as he can get off the can and buy a graphics card and operating system. The motherboard is one of my old ones an ASUS P5Q, which has a legacy BIOS and can no longer be upgraded. I told him to go ahead and buy a new motherboard, and I'd assemble it for him. He wants to opt out for the free, old motherboard. The only problem is that he has gone out and purchased a 4 TB hard drive, which is not compatible with my old legacy motherboard. I have heard that if you set up a master boot record (MBR), the PC will only see 2 TB of that 4 TB hard drive. The old ASUS is not configured to be set up for the new GPT (GUID Partition Table). I told him to return the hard drive to Amazon and get his money back and go buy a 1 or 2 TB hard drive at Best Buy. He won't do that. I know there is a Disk Wizard app that can fool Windows 8.1 into recognizing 4 TB. Now, my friend has thrown me a curve in that he wants me to set up the PC to dual boot Win 95, Win 98, Win XP all 32 bit OS's, and Win 8.1 all in 1 TB partitions. The dual booting can be set up, but I doubt whether 95, 98, or XP will even recognize a terabyte, much less 500 gigabytes.

Any of you computer brains have any thoughts about my dilemma regarding the hard drive?

 

[Porker]

Is he paying you? If not, build it the way he wants it....with warnings about the consequences. If yes refuse to build it that way.

 

[XPostFacto]

When I built my new PC, I merely wanted to pass on my still usable ASUS P5Q to someone who could make use of it. I didn't ask for any payment. My payment is to get the thing out of the house. All he needed was at least a terabyte or 500 gig hard drive and operating system, but that 4 TB HD has thrown a monkey wrench into the works, not to mention his insistence on playing old games and wanting me to set up everything with dual booting. He also was planning on buying an additional 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM. Fortunately I stopped him when I told him that the board only used DDR2 RAM. The moral to this story is never volunteer to help out your friends, especially the computer illiterate ones.

Regarding being paid, I think I will just give the PC to the Salvation Army and let them supply what the thing needs.

 

[Bleipriester]

I dont help anymore. I not going to waste my time installing XP on ancient systems that are damaged to such an extend that not even a start from the XP CD works without system crash just to be told that I have no idea...

 

[XPostFacto]

I know that if I ever get to build this PC for this guy, every time something happens, he will probably call me just to vent about the POS I built him. I sent him a website where he can get Win 8.1 OEM for $80 vs the usual $200 price for 8.1 Professional. He still hasn't made a move so when he finally calls me that he has everything, I will just drag my feet getting back to him.

I even wonder whether a computer shop would agree to install the old OS's, since they are no longer compatible with today's modern hardware?

 

[XPostFacto]

Things are already looking better and better. I just looked up whether Windows 95 is compatible with SATA drives. Nope, and another thing is that this PC won't have a floppy drive, and that's the only way you can install Windows 95 with 3.5 floppies. One down. I also hear that Windows 98 will not recognize SATA, either. I love it. This guy wants to get a high end Graphics card, but there are no video drivers that will work with 95 or 98. Looks like XP will be installed to dual boot with Windows 8.1. I like that. XP is still being updated, even though Microsoft says it doesn't support the OS.

any kind of way to install windows 95 on SATA hard drive and find win 95 drivers for network adapter Yahoo Answers

 

[waltky]

Web giants and large firms rely on cheap hard drives to store information in data centres...

Microwave breakthrough helps boost hard drive sizes
13 October 2017 - The data-storing abilities of hard drives could soon swell to 40 terabytes (TB) and beyond, says Western Digital.

Currently the largest hard disk drive (HDD) that stores data on spinning disks can hold about 14TB of information. Western Digital said the bigger drives were made possible by finding a way to use microwaves to write data on 3.5in drives. The first bigger-capacity drives should go on sale in 2019.

Hot stuff

While solid state drives are popular with home users, many large companies and web firms fill data centres with disks that depend on moving parts because, at high capacities, they are much cheaper and last longer. The drives store data on disks or platters that spin at high speed. A disk with a data cap acity of 40 terabytes would be able to hold more than 2,500 two-hour movies encoded at a standard resolution. Western Digital said it could produce the big drives as it had found a way to increase the density of data recorded on a disk by using microwaves - a technique known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR). The company is the first to produce a disk that uses this technology.

Datacentre server racks​

An allied method that uses heat instead of microwaves was thought to be the best way to help HDDs grow in capacity but it is known to be an expensive and technically tricky way to boost data density. The resulting devices, whose platters must be regularly heated beyond 400C, can also suffer reliability problems. Heat-assisted magnetic recording also requires changes in manufacturing plants and the materials used to make the magnetic platters that hold data. By contrast, MAMR requires far fewer changes to manufacturing and works with materials currently used to make HDDs.

In a statement, Western Digital said it had produced prototype MAMR drives this year, and would give engineering samples to key customers in 2018 and start volume production in 2019. By 2025, further refinement of the technology would push capacities past 40TB, it said. It added that a novel method of boosting data capacities was needed as it was getting harder to squeeze more data into HDDs using existing techniques.

Microwaves help boost hard drive sizes

 

[Marion Morrison]

95 will not see that drive or even the RAM. Multi-booting like that is a bad idea, it won't take long for the system to get corrupted and then some or all OSes will be lost.

 

[Marion Morrison]

Set him up a Win 7 or modern Linux with Virtual comps on his desktop. It'd be easier than trying to actually boot with all those old OSes.

That way you can utilize the HD space and maximum RAM.

XP only sees 3GB of RAM anyway.

Have you heard? They make these things called "SSDs" these days. ;x

 

[Ringel05]

Set him up a Win 7 or modern Linux with Virtual comps on his desktop. It'd be easier than trying to actually boot with all those old OSes.

That way you can utilize the HD space and maximum RAM.

XP only sees 3GB of RAM anyway.

Have you heard? They make these things called "SSDs" these days. ;x

Aren't they related to STDs...........