Quote:
Originally Posted by
fpmurphy
MBR partitions can be greater than 2Gb. GPT is required when your disk is greater than approx 2Tb and using 512 sector sizes.
Of course, it was a typo: I meant 2TB.
In MBR every partition is defined by its starting sector and its size in sectors. Both values are limited to 32 bits. So a partition max size, as well as its farthest possible starting point, is:
(2^32-1) x 512 = 2,199,023,255,040 bytes.
This means that you can use a MBR for two 1.5TB partitions in a 3TB disk, for instance. On the same disk you can't use MBR for a single 3TB partition, nor for four 750GB partitions, nor for two partitions of 0.5TB and 2.5TB ...
Today even disks having 4kB sectors show to the system virtual sectors of 512B. So the disk sector real size doesn't affect the 2TB limit.
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Bye