Printable View
I want a bit help to run a 3TB hard drive on Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 motherboard. I am working on a newly configured machine which has this board with 8GB ram and AMD FX processor. After connecting the drive I can only see around 2TB. I want some help to make it 3TB. I want to add more drives here. But this system is not able to show me completely the regular 3TB drive also. Can anyone help me to fix the issue.
The board that you had mentions supports a high storage drive. There might be some settings for that. You have to check that in the board manual. I remember that for a MSI board. There was a unlock utility that allow you to use the full 3TB storage space in your system. You can use different drive but that must be around 2TB so that you do not depend on third party apps for accessing all the space.
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 driver cd comes with a tiny utility called as 3TB unlock. This utility can help you to use the entire space of your hard drive. It creates a virtual partition in your system where you can use the remaining space. I am not sure about getting full size through bios or through any other way. Try to checkout in the manual if you can find solution on that. The board is quiet high end and it must have this feature.
Did you tried using GIGABYTE 3TB+ Unlock Utility. If not then just download that from the below site. Download and run it. You will get option to unlock the drive space easily through that. I am not sure about any other process. You have to select the utility on the basis of your motherboard model. Run the app and see what option you will get. This will surely add the extended space on the system.
This can be also done through bios. You have to set EFI for EFI CD/DVD Boot option and set AHCI for hard drive. When you boot your system through any bootable media you will be able to see the full 3TB storage space. Some percentage will be occupied by the mbr. I had did this long back on my friends system and it worked. I am able to get more than 2700GB which is quiet enough.
Gigabyte's 3TB+ Unlock utility works in a different way. This utility will help you to use the space but in virtual way. That means the drive will create a virtual partition. Most of the time a high storage space is not recognized by 32bit windows. This is the place where problem of space appear. You can use this utility to create virtual space and create multiple virtual partitions. Just test this utility once.
While using a high storage hard drive it is recommended to go with decent space division. Like a 2TB full storage + 1TB. That will surely work. If your bios settings are appropriate and the the system is running on 64bit platform. This thing is limited on 32bit platform. You can use a third party disk management utility. The one that comes in Windows is limited. Try Partition Magic and see whether you are able to get the full space or not.
Most of the time around 1TB will remain unallocated. That is because of NTFS limitation. It only recognize around 2TB and any space other than that will fall in the unallocated part. Here if you are not having any operating system on your drive then you can try creating different partitions. Create three of 1TB each and see whether you are getting a proper output or not. If you have OS on it then you have to use Windows installation disc.